To say that 2005 was perhaps the best year of television in the last decade
would not be an understatement. Unlike in years past, where the networks seemed
to be relying on overused reality concepts (like how many times can there be
a riff on the "Who Wants to Marry a …" concept?) this year comedies
and dramas were back in top form. It seemed as if the networks finally "got"
that they had to put as much emphasis on writing than on the just overall concept.

But it already seems as if the networks are starting to forget what they learned
in 2005. Rather than taking chances with shows like Lost or Scrubs,
networks seem to be trying to clone hits wherever they can. And when was the
last time a cloned hit was anything worth watching?

Still, if the 2004 television season was like a fine meal, then the 2005 season
was like an even finer meal with desert, a movie, dancing and a nightcap…

The best show of 2005 – Battlestar
Galactica: On one level, Battlestar Galactica works as
a traditional sci-fi yarn of "large space-ships" blasting other "large space-ships."
But where Battlestar Galactica excels is that it works on a whole
other level. Correction, other levels. Like it or not, Battlestar Galactica is
a mirror of our times. Good (like the best bits of humanity shining through
in times of crisis) or bad (paranoia existing at an almost cellular level)
we are them and they are us.

The rest, in alphabetical order:

Arrested Development:
Twenty minutes of Arrested Development is sheer bliss. At times watching
the show, I would literally laugh to the point of almost choking. But choking
in a good way. Now, it looks as if the current season of Arrested Development will
be the last. Depressing? Yes. Then again, the best way to cure this type of
depression is watching more Arrested Development! (A conundrum – I
know.)

Deadwood: Deadwood is
the perfect pragmatic drama on television these days. Characters act and behave
as they seemingly would and do in real life. I think that's the real strength
of Deadwood – it breaks all the rules of the "traditional" Western
genera by having the characters behave in a realistic manner rather than a
wishful one.

Doctor Who:
(Doctor Who has not yet aired in the U.S.) Every bit a reinvention
of the Doctor Who franchise as the remake of Battlestar Galactica was
to that one, the new Doctor Who took a series that had low production
values and decent story and gave it great production values and excellent story.
It's the "perfect storm" of a show with writer/creator Russell T. Davies overseeing
an excellent writing staff and he himself delivering excellent script after
script and new Doctor Christopher Eccleston redefining the character.

Extras: Ricky Gervais
and Stephen Merchant had a hard road to travel with Extras, their
follow-up one of the best comedies ever, The Office. Somehow, Gervais
and Merchant hit yet another homerun with Extras. Never relying on
simple sight gags or jokes, the comedy of Extras comes from the life
of the characters. In typical Gervais/Merchant style, one season of Extras consists
of just six shows, three hours of television. But what fun spending those three
hours with Extras is.

Lost: Has Lost redefined
the face of modern television? At least in the short term it has. This season
there were no less than four new dramas to "borrow" the technique used in Lost where
the story unfolds over the course of the entire season. And one of those shows,
Prison Break, is a certified hit. (No comment on the other three.)

Thick of It: (Thick of It has not yet aired in the
U.S.) A child to The Office, Thick of It roams the halls
of the British government and all that happens there. Sometimes I think we
feel that politicians and people with power in general are flawless. But Thick
of It reveals that politicians are people too with all the flaws that
go along with being human.

Veronica Mars:
Blending the typical teen drama (boyfriends and cars) with a hint of reality
(being burned alive in a gasoline soaked refrigerator) Veronica Mars bends
our expectations of what the teen is and transforms it into what it should
be. Somehow, Veronica Mars survived cancellation and is currently
airing in its second season on UPN.

Honorable mentions:

Scrubs – Still one of the funniest comedy series even after five seasons.

Justice League Unlimited: Adult themes in a kids cartoon. Paranoia
so thick it puts The X-Files to shame.

Mythbusters: Any show where the hosts blow up automobiles for fun
is a show for me!

File this under "what a gip" – people wanting to purchase the Lost DVDs
playable on region 2 DVD players (Europe, Japan, The Middle East) end up paying TWICE as much for the DVDs than people here in America and Canada with our region
1 DVDs.

It's been a little less than six months since the last new episode of Doctor
Who aired on British television and nearly a decade here in the U.S. (The
DVD set of the new Doctor Who series will be making its way stateside
early next year.)

The Christmas episode of the series is meant to bridge the gap between season
one and the second season. In "The Christmas Invasion," The Doctor
is out of commission after regenerating to a new body and it's up to Rose, Jackie
and Mickey to deal with an invasion of the Earth by a species of aliens known
as the Sycorax whom hold one-third of the Earth's population (around two billion
people) hostage.

Though much of the episode runs a bit slow, things do pick up when The Doctor
returns to form. Sometime in 2006, season two of Doctor
Who will begin airing
on BBC. And if this episode is any indication of the quality of the series,
season two will be as fun a ride as the first one was.

Don't forget, spin-off series from Doctor Who - Torchwood is
set to start airing sometime in '06 as well.

Murderball (2005): An interesting look at the sport of Wheelchair Rugby, aka “Murderball.” More
a study of the athletes who excel in the sport than the sport itself, Murderball sheds new light on just what it's like to be paraplegic. My only complaint
is that the movie is too short for all it trys to accomplish. (8/10)

The Exorcism
of Emily Rose (2005): In The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Father Moore
(Tom Wilkinson) is on trial for the death of Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter),
whom died after a failed exorcism. Lawyer Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) takes
the case defending the priest only to advance to a full partner at the law
firm she works at, but soon finds that whatever evil thing happened to Emily
might be real and after her as well. The Exorcism of Emily
Rose suffers from Saw (2004) syndrome– parts of the movie are very good and parts
of it are mediocre at best. Plus a lot of what happened in the courtroom seemed
to be a bit clichéd and unrealistic. (8/10)

Returning to NBC Tuesday, January 3, is the nearly canceled after one season
but oh-so-good Scrubs. Two episodes from the new fifth season will
air back-to-back starting at 9:00 P.M. (EST). From
NBC.com:

MY INTERN'S EYES - DR. COX PUTS J.D.'S SKILLS
AS AN ATTENDING TO THE TEST- J.D. (Zach Braff) struggles with decision-making
and responsibility now that he is an attending physician, all the while Dr.
Cox (John C. McGinley) is testing his skills. And while Elliot (Sarah Chalke)
is learning the ropes in her new hospital, she still feels more comfortable
hanging out at Sacred Heart. Meanwhile, Carla (Judi Reyes) is ready to have
a baby, but Turk (Donald Faison) afraid of moving forward continues to slip
her birth control pills.

SECRETS
AND LIES - J.D. (Zach Braff) questions the bond he has with his interns
when Dr. Kelso (Ken Jenkins) tells him that inevitably he will begin treating
them badly, as it has been throughout history at the hospital. The Janitor
(Neil Flynn) further complicates matters by telling J.D. that his interns only
laugh at his jokes to suck up to him. Meanwhile, Carla (Judy Reyes) visits
Elliot (Sarah Chalke) at her new job and inadvertently creates an awkward new
nickname for her friend when she tells her colleagues an embarrassing story.
Elsewhere, Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) prevents Turk (Donald Faison) from warning
Jordan (Christa Miller) about a notorious con man patient (guest star Alexander
Chaplin) in hopes that she’ll be mortified and quit.

Episode #48 – "Making a Stand"
GOB Bluth: "I've got this Christian girlfriend now, and she's trying to get me
a better man and reconnect with my son… And I'm trying to get her to renounce
God and f%$k me."

From Executive Producers David Mamet and Shawn Ryan, THE
UNIT is an action drama that follows a covert team of Special Forces operatives
as they risk their lives
on undercover missions around the globe, while their families maintain the
home front, protecting their husbands’ secrets. Jonas Blane leads the Unit on
missions out in the field and is responsible for taking new recruit Bob Brown
under his wing. The Unit includes Jonas, Colonel Tom Ryan, Mack Gerhardt, Charles
Grey, Keenan Williams and Bob Brown, all highly skilled, trustworthy, brave and
dependable soldiers whose ability to rely on each other is what creates their
brotherhood. Jonas’ wife, Molly, is the base matriarch who comforts and
counsels the other wives as they cope with the fear and uncertainty they experience
when their husbands leave home. Molly and Tiffy Gerhardt, a wife hiding her own
dark secrets, help Bob’s pregnant wife, Kim, acclimate to the stress
of her new secret life.

Mamet is one of the best writers working in the business today, having either
written or had a hand in movies like Spartan, Ronin and Glengarry
Glen Ross. Shawn Ryan is the creator of the series The Shield. The
Unit stars Dennis Haysbert
(24) and
Scott Foley (Felicity).

Moore's new deal will also allow him to continue as one of the show-running
executive producers of "Battlestar Galactica" for NBC Universal's
SCI FI Channel.…

The NBC pilot "Pen and the Sword" is among
one of the two projects currently in development, and Moore will serve as the
writer and executive producer of the fantasy drama. For SCI FI Channel, Moore
will (…) produce "Warehouse
13," a present-day, science-fiction adventure pilot.

There's an interesting article up over at JimHillMedia.com on the current King
Kong movie, the 1976 King Kong movie and how everything might relate to ex-Disney
chief Michael Eisner:

It took numerous trips to Los Angeles Superior Court to
finally sort out all the details. With Universal Studios trumpeting about how
their "The Legend
of King Kong" would obviously be the superior motion picture. A full-color
remake that would retain much of the charm of the original "King Kong" (I.E.
The story would still be set in the 1930s, all the monsters featured in the
film would still be created by using stop motion animation, etc.) with the
added plus of Sensurround.

There have been a series of twelve inch figures released from the movie Aliens.
(It looks as if these figures are from a company out of Hong Kong.) Characters
include Cpl.
Hicks, Sgt.
Apone and Pvt.
Vasquez. All are available for purchase online at Cotswold Collectibles.

The remake King Kong (2005) has been hailed by the critics as one of the best
movies of the year. I’d argue that although King Kong is a good movie, it is by no means a great one. Parts of King
Kong are brilliant and parts of the movie aren’t
so brilliant. But the brilliant parts go a long way to making up for the not
so brilliant ones.

King Kong (2005) follows most of the major plot points of
the original (1933) – the
crew of the ship “Venture” stumbles on a mysterious fog covered uncharted island.
There, they find that gigantic creatures including dinosaurs and an ape known
as Kong inhabit the island. When one of their crew is kidnapped and offered
up as a sacrifice to the ape beast, the crew of the Venture must go into the
deadly heart of the island to attempt rescue.

There were a few changes made to the characters. This time, filmmaker Carl
Denham (Jack Black) is in debt up to his eyeballs and sees filming on an uncharted
island as the perfect location to finishing a movie he has partially complete
and making a little money in the process. Ann Darow (Naomi Watts) is a struggling
actress brought on the trip more for her dress size, the same as the previous
actress who has dropped out of the picture, than her acting skills. Jack Driscoll
(Adrien Brody) is the writer of Denham’s movie, and only goes on the trip when
Denham tricks him into staying on the boat a few minutes too long while casting
off in order to finish the script.

The most notable difference between the versions is the relationship between
Kong and Darrow. In the original, Kong is a beast who holds onto Darrow as
a prize not wanting to give her back. She wants to get escape the beast, but
she is no more than a plaything to Kong. In the remake, Kong also kidnaps Darrow
but their relationship changes throughout the movie; it evolves to something
special, something different. Darrow comes to see the true Kong, a creature
who’s the last of his kind all alone in this world, and understands him. Most
interesting of all, one thing I thought while watching the remake was that
the Kong/Darrow relationship was more in line with The Iron Giant and Hogarth
Hughes in The Iron Giant (1999) movie than wild beast/helpless woman
of the original.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong has a much darker vision of the world that Kong exists in than the 1933 original. In his version, Darrow is so down on her luck that she considers stripping for money. At one point, a member of Denham’s
crew is killed execution style with a club to the head by the island natives.
A crewman from the Venture is swallowed alive by a slug-like creature and goes
down screaming.

And that’s one of the problems with the movie. It’s almost as if Jackson wants
to present the story of King Kong as a fantastical adventure mixed with realism.
In the fantasy King Kong, characters run in between the legs of stampeding
Brontosaurus while being chased by velociraptor-like dinosaurs. These characters
keep up with the stampede delivering on-the-mark perfect machine-gun shots
to the dinosaurs chasing them.

Then, though, Jackson seems to want to switch gears showing the “realities” of Skull Island. Characters are so frightened they cry, one of the characters is graphically speared by a native and as Kong searches out Darrow in downtown New York he chases down women matching her “look” and
tosses them aside like rag dolls when he does not find her.

I’m not sure these two competing styles work together. At one point we’re to believe in the fantastical, the next the realistic. It’s a tough sell and I’m
not sure Jackson is able to pull it off.

But what really hurts King Kong are several rather large plot-holes
present throughout the story. These holes do detract greatly from the movie
overall and I would chalk these up to either sloppy writing, bad editing or
bits of the movie being cut out to cut down on the already long running time.
However, even though there are problems with the overall story and mood, the
character of Kong is magnificent. He is a joy to watch and acts and looks,
for the most part, like a real ape. He becomes a real character. And I think
that’s a very important quality here – in the confines of this movie Kong is
real. When Kong dies at the end, it is a sad moment and not a relief as in
the original. I would expect that by this point people would have become so
emotionally involved with Kong that they might cry at his death.

I just wish that Peter Jackson could have delivered more emotional attachment
with the rest of King Kong (2005) as he did with the last twenty minutes of
the movie. (8/10)

The teaser poster for this upcoming Mission Impossible III movie was released
earlier this week. It's hard to believe that the first Mission Impossible (1996) will
be a decade old when the third one is released next Summer. Christ, I feel old.

The cocaine cowboys of the ’80s are gone, but Miami’s Casablanca allure, the undercover cops and the attitudes of Michael Mann’s culturally influential television series have been enhanced by time in the feature film version of Miami Vice.

Ricardo Tubbs (Academy Award® winner Jamie Foxx of Ray, Jarhead) is urbane and dead smart. He lives with Bronx-born intel analyst Trudy, played by British actress Naomie Harris (28 Days Later, upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean II and III), as they work undercover transporting drug loads into South Florida to identify a group responsible for three murders.

Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell of S.W.A.T., The New World) is charismatic and flirtatious until—while undercover working with the supplier of the South Florida group—he gets romantically entangled with Isabella, the Chinese-Cuban wife of an arms and drugs trafficker. Isabella is played by the Chinese actress Gong Li (Raise the Red Lantern, Memoirs of a Geisha).

The best undercover identity is oneself with the volume turned up and restraint unplugged. The intensity of this case pushes Crockett and Tubbs out onto the edge where identity and fabrication become blurred, where cop and player become one—especially for Crockett in his romance with Isabella and for Tubbs in the provocation of an assault on those he loves.

Miami Vice, as a large-scale feature film, liberates what is adult, dangerous and alluring about working deeply undercover…especially when Crockett and Tubbs go to where their badges don’t count…

In Syriana, oil is the substance that makes the "world go round," be
it the fuel that powers our nation's economy or the gigantic corporations that
make billions pulling it from the ground. And the price of loosing a constant
supply of oil to our government is so high, that they're willing to look the
other way while these gigantic corporations bribe, steal and force their way
into new supplies and, in fact, become indirectly involved in U.S. friendly
nation building in the Middle East to make sure the tap never runs out.

Syriana was
written and directed by Stephen Gaghan. Gaghan also wrote one of the best movies
of the last decade, Traffic (2000) , as well as The
Alamo (2004) which
I liked as well.

Syriana is interesting, though just a bit too complex with a few too many storylines
going on all at once. There's the story of Bob Barnes (George Clooney), a CIA
agent tracking a missing missile in the Middle East who finds himself at odds
with the government that is more interested in maintaining the status quo than
making a difference. There's the story of a lawyer (Jeffrey Wright) working
for an oil company, Pakistani workers looking for work after they've lost their
oil jobs in the Middle East, a prince (Alexander Siddig) wanting to succeed
his father to make real change, his American advisor (Matt Damon), the advisor's
wife (Amanda Peet)...

Clearly the most interesting story going on there is Clooney's as CIA agent
Bob Barnes. Barnes is in the best position to know the realities of the situation
in the Middle East having spent years there working as a "spook." Unfortunately
for him, his experience doesn't amount to much in the current administration
who sees what they'd like to see happening in the Middle East rather than what's
really going on. (There's a whole sub plot of members of the oil companies
being members of an organization devoted to bringing freedom to Iran as a cover
to get in good with the administration, when in fact Barnes knows the likelihood
of this happening to be very low.) And it doesn't help Bob that he speaks his
mind, he's no "yes man."

One thing I kept thinking while watching Syriana was
that a story with the depth and breadth of Syriana might better be served as
a multi-episodic television show airing on HBO. Here, at least, these many
stories could play out and have some greater depth than they do in a just two
hour long movie. (8/10)

Just days after his 65th birthday, groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor
died Saturday of a heart attack, his wife told CNN.

Pryor, who had been ill with
multiple sclerosis, died at Encino Hospital near Los Angeles at 7:58 a.m. PT.
Jennifer Lee Pryor tried to revive him at their home before paramedics arrived
and took him to the hospital, she said.

"He enjoyed life right up until the end," she said, adding that
Pryor had been laughing a lot and was in good spirits in the two weeks preceding
his death. "At the end, there was a smile on his face."

Justine Bateman, real life sister to Jason Bateman (Michael Bluth), will guest-star
on Arrested Development early next year. From
Zap2It:

In the show's latest bit
of inside-joke casting, Justine Bateman -- the older sister of star Jason Bateman
-- will guest-star on the FOX series scheduled for Monday, Jan. 9. She's filming
the episode this week. (…) (Justine will) play the far less cringe-inducing
role of Michael's long-lost older sister Nellie.

After discovering he has another
sister, Michael tracks Nellie down and hires her as a consultant for The Bluth
Co. As with most things related to the business, though, the plan doesn't quite
work out the way Michael envisioned, and he discovers Nellie might not be who
she says she is.

The "Announcement Teaser" trailer has been released for the upcoming X-Men
3 movie. Do I detect a hint of "Days of Future Past" here? Am
I the only one to be worried as to the look of The Beast? Correction, really
worried?

In which Ricky, Steve and Karl discuss ...
the pros and cons of technological invention, leading on to Karl's Malthusian concerns and a possible solution. There's a digression into the extra sensory perception of early hominids. Oh, and some Monkey News of course. Plus strange tales about lethal drinking vessels and stately homes.

To call Kiss Kiss Bang Bang “brilliant” would be an understatement. To put
it simply enough, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of the finest movies to be released
in quite some time and one of the funniest as well.

In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,
bumbling crook Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is shot running from a toy
store burglary, leaving his partner behind worse for wear in an ally. Harry
only escapes police pursuit by ducking into a random door, which happens to
be hosting a movie audition. Harry aces the audition, about a crook that leaves
his wounded partner behind, by really getting into character, crying and screaming.
The producers think he's using "Method Acting" to get into character but in
fact he's simply reacting to that night's events.

Harry finds himself out in L.A.
to audition for studio executives and meets “Gay” Perry
(Val Kilmer), a private detective hired to coach Harry on his upcoming audition
who, as his name/nick-name so quaintly says, happens to be gay.

Harry accompanies
Perry on a case observing a cabin in the woods where the two stumble across
the murder of a woman locked in a trunk of a car driven into a lake. It quickly
becomes apparent that the whole thing's a set-up meant to pin the body on Harry
and Perry. And when the sister of a woman Harry met at a party whom Harry knew
as a child in Indiana turns up dead via suicide, everything starts to make
sense. Or does it?

In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, character Harry narrates the movie
at times literally stopping the action in its tracks, skipping around in time
and scene spouting lines like, “How 'bout it, filmgoer? Have you solved the case of the - the
dead people in L.A.?” At other times, Harry breaks the fourth wall commenting
on the movie as it plays out on the screen. Harry remarks that he hates tacked
on Hollywood endings where people who should be dead from their wounds turn
up alive at the end of the movie, and that why doesn't everyone who died in
the movie come back? With that, the door of Harry's room opens and every character
killed during the preceding two hours walks in as if they were at a family
reunion. Then, to cap it all off, an actor wearing a very bad Abe Lincoln costume
walks through the door, then Elvis…

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang feels as if the movie Lethal
Weapon were written by someone
who had worked on the television series Arrested Development – it has
that sort of irrelevance for the genre as well as letting the audience in on
the joke. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang isn't a send-up of the genre like a Naked
Gun or Airplane; it's simply a take on it.

In fact, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was written
and directed by Shane Black, writer and creator of the Lethal
Weapon franchise.
In the movie, Black takes the characters and concepts he first introduced nearly
twenty years, dissects and twists them into something new, funny, unique and
brilliant. (10/10)

The Los Angeles Times has posted an interesting article on BBC America, the shows they air and BBC America's plans for the future. Those plans apparently include original programming. From the article:

It can be difficult to find a broad television audience in the U.S. for contemporary British fare, in which the language can be incomprehensible and the quirky humor might miss the funny bone by a mile. But after seven years, BBC America is still trying — and making inroads — with a newly expanded budget, adjustments in programming, and a plan to create its own original shows.

Original shows!? There are literally THOUSANDS of BBC shows originally aired overseas which have NEVER been seen by an American audience. Why is there any need to make U.S. specific shows for BBC America when, literally, just about everything aired on the various BBC channels is new to an American audience?

Lately I've started to get the feeling that rather than taking chances with its shows, like airing The Office before it was a bonafide Golden Globe winning hit, that BBC America is instead taking British shows that are like American hits and running those instead. If Desperate Housewives is a hit here, then BBC America will start air Footballers Wive$ about, "the ongoing story of our favorite naughty wives and their hubbies (…) where lies, deceit, sex, and scandal are all in a day's work." And if the various CSI franchises pulls in the ratings then BBC America will air Silent Witness, about pathology which BBC America promotes as "Dead men do tell tales."

Occasionally, BBC America does air quality programming. Stuff like The Office, State of Play, Coupling and Shameless give spice to BBC America. But while BBC America airs hours and hours of programming like Mile High, Footballer$ Wives and Cash in the Attic, real gems of British television go unwatched by the American masses. Where are shows like Thick of It, Doctor Who or Spaced? Apparently nowhere when you live in America.

BBC America seems to be trapped between two worlds showing BRITISH shows to an AMERICAN audience. But what they fail to remember is that being a member of the American audience, all we have to do to watch American shows is switch the channel.

According to Ricky, "I want to do a radio show where I can say I want, when I want for as long as I want and that's free for anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world. We didn't want it to just be the best bits of a radio programme you'd missed so this is a show that is straight-to-Pod-cast. I suppose we're trying to create an exclusive club. We'd prefer this to be a few people's favourite show than a huge samey ineffectual broadcast"

The new version of Doctor Who will indeed be coming stateside after all, abet not to television screens. Via Sci Fi Wire:

The BBC told SCI FI Wire that it will release the complete first season of the new British SF TV series Doctor Who on DVD in the United States on Feb. 14, 2006, offering Americans their first official look at the hit U.K. show. BBC Video will release Doctor Who: The Complete First Series with all 13 of the first-season episodes, starring Christopher Eccleston as the immortal Timelord and Billie Piper as his sidekick, Rose, as well as more than four hours of extras. The DVD set will carry a suggested retail price of $99.98.

The new Doctor Who series is EXCELLENT to say the least, but $100 for thirteen episodes? Aren't those are HBO prices? The season one DVD of Battlestar Galactica contained fifteen episodes at $60, while the Doctor Who set has thirteen at $100. WTF?

Cunningham became the first Navy ace in the Vietnam War, flying an F-4 Phantom
from aboard aircraft carriers, and recording five confirmed kills, making him
one of two U.S. pilots to "Ace". He allegedly also downed a Vietnamese
fighter ace who flew a MiG-17 against him, although whether it was Cunningham's
shot which downed the plane and whether a Vietnamese ace was truly aboard the
MiG are disputed by some.

Praise be! Arrested Development returns to Fox next Monday (12/5).
(Or at least it's supposed to return. Who knows if this will actually happen.) From the official
Fox site:

After Michael announces he’s marrying Rita,
George Sr. worries that she’s
after their family’s money. But when Rita’s Uncle Trevor tries to
stop the wedding by revealing some surprising information about Rita, Michael
must decide if he wants to walk down the aisle on “The Ocean Walker” episode
of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Monday, Dec. 5 (8:00-8:30 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

Check out this site – notstarring.com.
Essentially, notstarring.com is one gigantic database of actors and actresses
whom COULD have starred in certain movies but, for one reason or another, didn't.
For example, did you know that Angelina Jolie was turned down for the role
of
Call in Alien: Resurrection? Or that Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford,
Richard Gere, Al Pacino and Michael Douglas all turned down the role of Judge
Wakefield
in
the movie Traffic, before Michael Douglas reconsidered and finally
accepted?

Even in the classic movie The Wild Bunch, actor Robert Blake passed on the
role of Angel which finally went to Jaime Sánchez.

Good Night, and Good Luck follows Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and the staff of the CBS program See
It Now as they investigate Senator McCarthy and his hearings on Communism. In the early 1950s, McCarthy saw Communist sympathizers at nearly every level of government and was out to expose each and every one. Except that upon examination by Murrow and the See
It Now staff, there was no way to prove these charges because any and all evidence was never released, instead kept in secret.

The hearings were a sort of trial by public opinion, and there was no real way to prove the one’s innocence. The feeling was that anyone brought up McCarthy’s hearings were guilty, or at the very least guilty by association.

Using McCarthy’s own words against him, Murrow slowly unravels McCarthy’s accusations and, in the end, stops the hearings and moves the Senator from the spotlight to the “back row.”

Good Night, and Good Luck is also an examination on the politics of television. From a producer’s point of view, a show like See
It Now cost more and made less than a simple game show. And when a television show like See
It Now is controversial, television executives start making decisions based on their pocketbook rather than what’s right.

Murrow put his professional “neck” on the line in his battle with McCarthy and this left his career bloodied and battered. See
It Now is moved from a highly visible nightly broadcast to a Sunday afternoon one.

Putting his “money where his mouth is,” Good Night, and Good Luck is co-written and directed by George Clooney – it’s plainly obvious to see where Clooney stands politically. Where most actors shun controversy, Clooney seems to gravitate to it. Movies like Three
Kings, Fail Safe and (seemingly) the upcoming Syriana also had/have a hint of political controversy within.

If Good Night, and Good Luck suffers from one thing, it’s the length of the movie. Good
Night, and Good Luck suddenly ends, without much explanation of what had just occurred, what was to occur in the following years and how what Murrow did affects us today. Still, not all movies can be perfect. (9/10)

In the opening minutes of The Ice Harvest, slightly dim-witted “mob lawyer” Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) along with strip-club owner Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) have just stolen over two million dollars of the mob’s money via a bank withdrawal. Being Christmas Eve, Charlie and Vic know that this theft won’t be uncovered for some time and all they have to do is act natural overnight until they leave town in the morning.

What follows is Charlie being incapable of anything even close to keeping a low profile as he deals with a drunken friend Pete (Oliver Platt) married to Charlie’s ex-wife, acts out of character as he buys drinks for people in bars, comps strippers their stage fees and goes on the hunt for a damning photograph for a female strip club owner Renata (Connie Nielsen) that Charlie pines for.

Although The Ice Harvest has some truly funny moments, I wouldn’t call this movie a “comedy” as the commercials, trailers and print material for this movie do. It’s more along the lines of a movie such as Out
of Sight, which takes the drama, comedy and romance genera and places them into one movie. (The moral of the story is don’t believe Hollywood marketing materials!)

I never felt as if The Ice Harvest was able to completely get into gear story wise, in that there were simply too many bits and pieces of the plot going on at one time. There’s the story of Charlie and Vic, Charlie and Pete, Charlie and Renata, Charlie and Rusti, Charlie and his kids…

Still, the movie isn’t all that bad and there are several very interesting scenes in the movie, which make it mostly worthwhile. (7/10)

In a "what are they thinking of" move, HBO has decided to not bring back Deadwood in March, as previously scheduled, but instead June with the Tom Hanks' produced drama Big Love instead filling in the Deadwood gap. Season three of Deadwood would then premiere in June '06. That's more than a year between the end of the second season of Deadwood to the start of the third. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Since Love was a new show, HBO decided it would benefit more from Sopranos as a lead-in at 9 p.m., a network rep says. Deadwood, though loved by critics, has been less loved by viewers.

The June lineup has Deadwood at 9, followed by season three of Entourage and Lucky Louie, a new comedy starring Louis C.K.

Hi-Larious trailer for the upcoming Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston "romantic
comedy" The
Break Up.
Keep an eye out for "Andrew" in the trailer. That's none other than Peter Billingsley,
the actor who played Ralphie in the classic A Christmas Story.

McFarlane Toys has released a second series of their (apparently) popular military
series toys, calling them McFarlane's
Military 2nd Tour of Duty. The first series
of toys were released earlier this year, with the line having
an update a few months back. This time around, the series includes an Army Desert
Infantry Grenadier, Army Special Forces Sniper, Army Paratrooper, Marine Radioman,
Marine and a Navy Seal Commando.

Finally available – "Battlestar
Galactica: The Official Companion."
This book is (mostly) an episode guide to the mini-series and season one of Battlestar
Galactica, with a few interesting trivia nuggets and interviews thrown in
for
good
measure. For example, did you know that although Edward James Olmos and Mary
McDonnell
were the
original choices for William Adama and Laura Roslin respectively, that Brian
Cox (X-Men 2), Chris Cooper (Jarhead), Tom Skerritt (Alien),
Sam Elliot (We
Were
Soldiers) and Powers Boothe (Deadwood) were all considered for
Adama and Susan Sarandon (Thelma & Louise), Alfre Woodard (Star
Trek: First Contact) and
Kathleen
Quinlan
(Apollo 13) were all considered
for Roslin?

And so it begins – I've started my list of television pilots for the 2006-2007 season. It doesn't seem like it, but shows that will end up cluttering your television dial next fall begin their "lives" now.

Zap2It is
reporting that the Sci Fi Channel has given the go-ahead for a third season
of Battlestar Galactica. Technically, when the series returns
this January, it will be the second half of the second season – also known
as "Season 2.5." Season three of Battlestar Galactica will
probably begin airing sometime next spring/summer.

The unaired pilot episode of Night Stalker showed promise, but I never felt as if the episodes that after that, including the reedited pilot episode that aired as the first episode, were ever as good as the unaired pilot.

A DVD of the (scary as all hell) television movie Threads has
been released in the U.K. Unfortunately, the disk is only playable in "Europe,
Japan, South Africa and the Middle East including Egypt." No word on
when (or even if) the DVD will ever make it to the U.S.

Say goodbye to FOX's Monday night schedule – though neither has been "officially" cancelled, Variety is reporting that both Arrested Development AND Kitchen Confidential have been taken off the schedule, "effective immediately". (…) Arrested's episode order has been slashed from 22 to 13, and rumors are swirling that Kitchen won't be going back into production at all. Both series have shows in the can, and it's expected that they'll come back in December to close out their runs, as FOX was already planning to shove them aside for new episodes of House in the spring.

Over the past few weeks, several major remakes have been announced by various Hollywood studios. First up, one of the best movies of all time, The Wild Bunch (1969), is set to be turned into a "a thriller involving heists, drug cartels and the CIA, set in contemporary Mexico" according to Dark Horizons. David Ayer, who wrote the less than cerebrial The Fast and the Furious and S.W.A.T., is set to direct this remake based off of his script.

The original The Wild Bunch followed a group of criminals, running from the law after a failed bank heist and a shoot-out in a town, entering Mexico and agreeing to pull off just one more heist for a Mexican Army General so that they can finally back out of a life of crime. As character Dutch Engstrom puts it, "Back off to what?"

Cool as hell book, written by actor Matthew Modine on his experiences on the
set of the movie Full Metal Jacket with director Stanley Kubrick. The
"Full Metal Jacket
Diary" is well designed with a stamped metal cover (how appropriate)
and has the content to match. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. From
Amazon:

Modine, who starred as Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick's
1987 Vietnam War masterpiece, Full Metal Jacket, gets right to the core of
his subject by beginning with the question, "What was Stanley like?" He supplies the answers throughout
this diary on the movie's filming, which should provide new insights for Kubrick
enthusiasts. (…) The book is
filled with Modine's excellent photographs, which powerfully supplement the sometimes
sketchy narrative. In the end, the work succeeds in expressing Modine's attitude—"I'm
going to make you feel the horror of death." The stainless steel–covered
book—each one laser-etched with a serial number—should become a
collector's item for fans of the legendary director.

Jarhead is a movie about warriors stuck in an expansive desert with
nothing to do.

In Jarhead, Jake Gyllenhaal (The Day After Tomorrow)
plays Anthony Swooford aka “Swoof,” a
Marine scout sniper who is figuratively the tip of the military spear. When
Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Swoof is part of the massive military build-up
in Saudi Arabia as part of Desert Shield. Swoof wants the military glory of
the movies. For Swoof, though, his military experience is little more than
sitting in the desert, waiting for the war and trying to stay out of trouble.
What is thought to be a two-week excursion turns into a long, boring multi-month
stay in the middle of nowhere.

Swoof and his platoon are stuck in-between wars.
The war they trained for, fighting Soviets in Europe, bears little resemblance
to the ultra-fast Air Force lead war that Desert Storm becomes. The war moves
so fast that it leaves these Marines behind.

All that Swoff and his comrades want
to do is fight, but his fighting experience is limited to just over four days
of walking, being strafed by a coalition aircraft and nearly sniping an Iraqi
officer near the end of the war.

Jarhead and The Wild Bunch share
much of the same themes of men “in a changing
land…out of step (and) out of place” from The Wild Bunch tagline.

When
the Marines watch scenes from Apocalypse Now before being deployed to
Saudi Arabia, this is what they hope war is like. The war they experience is
much different. As Swoof puts it, “Every war is different, every war is the
same.”

Patrick Stewart: "I will make it so…You've
seen Star Trek: The Next Generation?"Andy: "I haven't. No."Patrick Stewart: "Why, your wife won't let you have it
on?"Andy: "I'm not married."Patrick Stewart: "Your girlfriend then?"Andy: "I haven't got a girlfriend. I live alone."Patrick Stewart: "You're not married and you haven't
got a girlfriend and you've never watched Star Trek?"Andy: "No."Patrick Stewart: "Good lord."

Andy's Agent (Discussing Andy's script): "Have
you given any thought as to who'll play the main character?"Andy: "I'm playing the main character." Andy's Agent: "Really? Are you sure? Because you're sort of a bit of a
nobody. I'm not sure they'd cast a nobody in the main role."

Andy's Agent (to
Andy): "I'm not sure what it is you can do."

Andy: "I don't want it filmed in front of a live studio audience…"Andy's Agent (to BBC television execs): "Unless you guys disagree with
that. In that case we can change all that and do whatever you want to do."

Andy: "You're
like the most grown-up person I know." Maggie: "I'm sort of like the only person you know."Andy: "You win by default."

This Monday (11/7) , Fox will show a one hour block of Arrested Development from 8:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. (EST). It looks to me as if this episode is an hour long rather than two half-hour (normal) episodes back-to-back, though I could be wrong. Fox describes the episode(s) as:

In an effort to prove to Rita he ’s not a wimp, Michael tries to convince George Michael to join him in some manly activities, but George Michael is too busy prepping girlfriend Ann for an “Inner-beauty Pageant.” So Michael and his recently discovered nephew Steve Holt enter a triathlon, only to discover Gob is the one who stumbles at the finish line. Back at work, Michael must deal with a huge mole problem in order to salvage a major real estate deal. But when Gob and Buster team up with George Sr.’s surrogate, Larry, to help Michael save the deal, their plan falls apart in a big way. Meanwhile, Tobias mistakes a CIA agent for a CAA agent and inadvertently betrays the family, and Michael makes Rita a proposal she can’t refuse…

With the death of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine co-creator Michael Piller yesterday, I was reminded of an article I originally wrote for the Fort Wayne Reader but was ultimately never published. The article, entitled "There's always been a warm place in my heart for Sci Fi," goes in depth with the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Michael Piller, co-creator of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and executive producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation has died at 57. From Star Trek.com:

Michael Piller, best known to television viewers around the world as the executive producer/co-creator of more than 500 hours of Star Trek, lost his long battle with an aggressive form of head & neck cancer on Tuesday, November 1, 2005 at 4:51 a.m. at his home in Los Angeles. He was 57. He is survived by his wife Sandra, daughter Brent and son Shawn.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted two possible new moons orbiting Pluto, the ninth planet in our solar system. If confirmed, the candidate moons could provide new insight into the nature and evolution of the Pluto system and the early Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is a vast region of icy, rocky bodies beyond Neptune's orbit.

Andy's Agent: "If you insist on remaining a "blob," could
you maybe at least get a tan?" Andy: "They're looking for a fat
bloke with a tan, are they? What's that for, Oliver Stone's story of Budda?"

Andy: "Before I walk out of here, possibly forever,
have you got anything for me at all?" Andy's Agent: "Loads of stuff. Do you fancy (children's
theater) in Guildford with Les Dennis?"Andy: "No…What, that's it?"Andy's Agent: "Yeah, I thought you'd go with that one." Andy: "…What's the role?" Andy's Agent: "It is the part of the genie in Aladdin." Andy: "They're out looking for a fat bloke for that,
are they?" Andy's Agent (Reading): "With a tan, ideally."

Director Bunny (To the actors): "And before any of
you have me up on sexism charges remember, this is my daughter." Andy: "His daughter? But he's definitely gay?" Maggie: "He can't be gay if he's got a daughter." Andy: "Oscar Wilde was married with two kids." Maggie: "Well, he couldn't have been gay." Andy: "I've got to stop hanging around with you."

Les Dennis: "Why
don't people want to come out and see Les Dennis?" Andy: "They do." Les Dennis: "Why not twice as many?"

Note – I am looking forward to the upcoming movie King Kong and plan on seeing it opening day. Still…

I'm still trying to figure this one out – the original King Kong was 100 minutes long while the new Peter Jackson version will clock in at (nearly) three times the length. Why? I'm hoping that this extra length isn't a bunch of Jackson's patented "sweeping vistas" shots he used over and over again in The Lord of the Rings films or extra time with the Darrow/Denham love story. Although actress Naomi Watts might be the acting star of the film, the real star of the film is Kong.

The original King Kong is one of the most tightly edited 100 minutes of film in existence. There are no needless shots or story in the movie. Nothing is wasted.

According to BBC, this extra running time in the new version of King Kong has pushed the movie $32 million over budget to a total of $207 million. The original King Kong cost an estimated $670,000 to make – $15 million adjusted for inflation.

The New York Times has published an article on TV shows on DVD, and people who
spend days straight watching them. From
the article:

Marathon viewing of series is creating a new breed of television aficionados,
some say, people with a sharper eye for narrative twists, suspense techniques
and character development. Like film buffs they become familiar with the names
of the directors and writers of a series, pick up on nuances others may have
missed and acquire a deeper appreciation of plotlines. (…)

Seven Rivera, 31, a lawyer, once squeezed five full seasons of "Gilmore
Girls" into two months, though he said his most impressive DVD marathon
was when a snowstorm caused his office to close and he spent about 22 hours watching
the entire first season of "Angel."

We finally got in downtime this past weekend, and scrounged up enough pennies to go and pay to see Doom.

Alrighty boys and girls, now gather round for the story of how Universal Studios decided to depict the tale of Doom.(Um... Ugh??)

Story starts out with how Humanity finally made it to Mars, via a portal discovered in Arizona. (Last I checked, everybody was making it there via space ships?) Dubbed "The Ark", the 'blob of Jello' portal is used to transfer various personnel to the surface of Mars, to begin research on the planet, scientific experiments, etc etc. Sounds like fun, right? Till (of course) something goes horribly wrong in the research labs, and the facility is shut down.

Enter our faithful Space Marines(???), with 'The Rock' leading the way as "Sarge", and Karl Urban as "Reaper". The other Marines, well wont go into detail about them, cause they are pretty much just cannon Fodder. Just know that if they were true marines, they would have kicked some ass before getting toasted. The Marines get tasked by their CO to head up to the Mars Olduvai facility via "The Ark" and assess the situation.

After about 30 minutes(!!!!!!) of bumbling, bouncing, and stumbling through the facility, the Marines finally discover that something is amiss. Scientists are either found dead or not found at all. Test animals are found ripped to shreds. Finally, the Marines stumble upon their first baddie, a Scientist apparently mutating into a zombie(?) and eating a test rat. Of course the Marines promptly dispatch him with brutal force.

As the plot progresses, Dr. Samantha Grimm, head of the Archelogical site on Mars, reveals to the marines that an apparent genetic mutation is running rampant, and that these "monsters" the marines are beginning to find all over the complex are former employees.

With that concept in mind, the Marines begin to realise that not everything is kosher at the Mars facility. The genetic mutation is a direct result of an additional genome introduced into some "unwilling" test subjects.

So, with that in mind, the Quarantine is cast out, and "total eradication" is put into effect. However, the marines could only be so lucky, as their numbers dwindle down to 2. Armed with the knowledge that the 'genetic' mutation must not reach Earth, Sarge puts in motion a plan of wiping out every known member of the Olduvai facility. Of course, the Marines dont like the idea of killing innocent bystanders, and revolts against Sarge.

Its at this point, you can tell that Sarge has been infected with the Genome, and is slowly going insane, and that the final battle is sure to come.

I wont spoil it for you, however, I do recommend that you wait for the DVD rental on this one, or catch it on HBO. Not saying that this was a horrific movie (cause well, it wasnt that great either), but i do recommend saving those pennies for another rainy day.

Acting was not the worlds greatest in this movie. Sarge seemed to be the only believeable character, along with John "Reaper" Grimm to be the next in line. Everyone else were pretty much what was intended for them: Cannon Fodder.

Special effects were good. The work on the monsters was excellent, although a lot of the Doom magic was left out of this movie rendition. (IE Imps throwing plasma fireballs, no other weapons involved that made Doom the Game so much more enjoyable ;no shotgun, no plasma rifle).
The BFG effects were awesome. Kinda like bottling liquid hot Magma and shooting it at a wall. You get that kind of effect, only blue in color. heh.

A technology that was introduced FOR the movie was the "Nano-walls", which are solid until unlocked, and allow movement of anything from one room to the next (which also included the monsters!)

Best part of the flick has to be the 10 minute sequence where the lead character "Reaper" goes First Person Perspective, and allows us to see the action from his eyes. The fight with the "Pinky" monster and chainsaw is the BEST!

Bad parts of the flick? Where the HELL were the Demons from Hell? The whole game depicts Hell opening up and releasing its spawn on the complex of Mars, thereby terrorizing everyone with its horror! Genetic mutations.. Hasnt that been done already? Oh yeah RESIDENT EVIL. Grrrrr And where were all the kick ass weapons from the game? No shot guns?! COME ON NOW

So anyway, if you got 8 bucks to spare (check them couch cussions), go ahead and see Doom in the theaters. If not, well, there's always a future release to HBO. Overall, I give Doom a 6 out of 10.

Deadwood creator David Milch is working on a cop drama for HBO. From
ABC News:

The untitled project is based on ("NYPD Blue" collaborator, Bill)
Clark's experiences as a rookie undercover officer assigned to keep tabs on the
Black Panthers and other countercultural rabble-rousers during the height of New
York's radical-chic moment. It was also the era of New York City's Knapp Commission
probe that revealed scandalous levels of corruption among New York's finest. (…)

"The post-Vietnam period was a period of enormous moral confusion,"
Milch said. "It felt very much like a starting-over point, where there was
a re-examination of social assumptions about the idea of law enforcement and the
social contract." (…)

It will be a tall order to recreate the tension and dark mood of that era in a
weekly series, "but if anyone can really make this work," then Milch
can, Clark said (…)

The show will be developed under a new two-year production pact that also covers
Milch's services on "Deadwood." Milch said he's committed to shepherding
his earthy Western saga for the foreseeable future. "It requires some cooperation
from God, but if he's willing, I'm willing," Milch said.

There was an episode of The Outer Limits on this weekend which seemed
to share some plot elements with the current
season of Lost. Interesting,
but I seriously doubt that the two stories have anything to do with one and
other:

DEAD MAN'S SWITCH
Ben Conklin (JAMES LE GROS) has been a loner ever since his parents died when
he was twelve years old. This is one reason why General James Eiger (DONNELLY
RHODES) selected him to spend a year buried in a bunker 11,000 feet below the
Artic tundra, manning the controls of a doomsday device set up by world leaders
after the Hubble space telescope spotted 11 spaceships heading towards Earth.
The device is designed as a last-line deterrent against alien invasion and
Conklin's job, shared with four other loners in four other bunkers, is to hit
a dead man's switch on the bunkers control panel that prevents the doomsday
device from going off and destroying aliens and mankind alike. (…)

Conklin realizes
that he carries the weight of the world - and the fate of mankind in the palm
of his hand.

In more scheduling moves not destined to win any awards (or
keep their shows
on the air)…

After baseball ends this week and Fox returns to it's "normal" fall schedule,
the
time slot
where Arrested Development usually airs, will instead be part
of
a
two
hour
block
of Prison
Break. (If only Fox would promote Arrested Development half
as much
as they do Prison Break…) Arrested
Development will return the week of November 7, but once again it seems
as
if
Fox
isn't happy unless they're either moving the time Arrested Development airs
or not
showing
it at
all. Arrested Development started airing Sunday night's,
but sometimes
was on Wednesdays before Fox moved the show to Friday nights this summer.
Currently, the series is supposed to air Mondays at 8:00 P.M. (EST) but was
off an entire month for baseball playoffs and The World Series. Confused
about when Arrested Development is on? I bet a lot of people share the
same sentiment.

Then, when Fox's winter schedule goes into effect this January, there's
no indication
that Arrested Development's is anywhere on Fox's schedule. Moreover,
Fox
is
seriously
shuffling their schedule around moving shows all around the schedule. House,
M.D. takes Arrested Development's time slot Mondays
nights. Prison Break, usually on Mondays, is gone and replaced
with
the
return of 24. And also Bones is shifted
up an
hour
on Tuesday nights to 9:00 P.M. (EST ) – the time when House, M.D. usually
airs.

As if on cue from the upcoming Halloween season, Vivendi Universal and Monolith have released FEAR, the First Encounter Assault and Recon First Person Shooter.

FEAR is an intense first person close-quarters combat experience with rich atmosphere and an engaging storyline. The story begins as an unidentified paramilitary force infiltrates a multi-billion dollar aerospace compound. The government responds by sending in Special Forces, but loses contact as an eerie signal interrupts radio communications. When the interference subsides moments later, the team has been literally torn apart. As part of a classified strike team created to deal with threats no one else can handle, your mission is simple: Eliminate the intruders at any cost. Determine the origin of the signal. And contain this crisis before it spirals out of control. [Vivendi Universal]

With that all in mind, I had reviewed the demo a while back (See my previous article on DU back in August), and from it I deemed the game pretty much a typical FPS with a horror twist thrown in here and there.

Now, mind you, apparently a lot of gaming web sites out there suggest that I am on crack for my lack of enthusiasm for this game. However, given the steep Hardware requirements for this game, and some of the blundering done by the AI in the demo, I'm still not convinced that this game is a "highlight" in First Person shooters. Even some of the design for the various levels seemed "repetitive" and dull.

I dunno, maybe I'm being too critical on the game. I've had my hands on several FPS in the past, (Including Half Life 2, and Doom3) and I was astounded by the graphical quality that they possess. Doom3 had me checking behind corners and looking in the shadows with a flashlight, wary of some Demon that wanted to rip out a portion of my ribcage; while Half Life 2 made me feel entirely in another world, dashing back and forth to fight against alien oppression.

As always, there are limits with what one can do with today's technology. But from what I've seen in FEAR, the graphics look somewhat dated, like the game has been sitting on a shelf somewhere at Sierra headquarters, then suddenly pulled and released to the public.

Anyhow, you get to decide. Check out the link below for several reviews on the game. I, for one, think I will hold off on playing it anytime soon.

Episode #30 – "...And Found."Hotel Manager: "Do not open the door for people like you."Echo: "They don't leave tracks."

WTF!? Lost is ALREADY going into reruns after only FOUR new episodes
having aired!? Oh no, here we go again. New episodes of Lost won't start airing again until the second week of November. Ugh. Oh well, there's
always Veronica Mars.

One time companion to Doctor Who, Captain Jack (John Barrowman) will headline a Doctor Who spin-off series entitled Torchwood. Torchwood will begin airing next summer on BBC and, like Doctor Who, will run thirteen weeks. I happen to like the Captain Jack character. From The Independant:

He (Doctor Who scriptwriter Russell T Davies ) said: "Torchwood will be a dark, clever, wild, sexy, British crime/sci-fi paranoid thriller cop show with a sense of humour - the X Files meets This Life…"

Torchwood will allow Davies to explore relationships a little further. Mr Murphy said of the new series: "The people have affairs with one another. There will be sex and swearing, I assume. I'm quite relaxed about that, it will be post-watershed and Russell can do it in a funny and sexy way."

Describing the idea behind the new show, the BBC controller said: "It's a renegade bunch of investigators who investigate real-life, normal crimes. They also look into alien happenings. They have been charged by the British government to find alien technology that has fallen to Earth and they need to do it without the FBI and UN knowing."

There's an interesting official blog up and running covering the movie (tentatively titled) Sunshine. Sunshine is by the writer and director of 28 Days Later, covered many times here at Dangerous Universe. The movie is described as:

The Sun is dying, and mankind is dying with it. Our last hope: a spaceship and a crew of eight men and women. They carry a device which will breathe new life into the star. But deep into their voyage, out of radio contact with Earth, their mission is starting to unravel. Soon the crew are fighting not only for their lives, but their sanity.

The film once again pairs director Danny Boyle with writer Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald, who previously teamed up for the thinking person’s zombie film, 28 DAYS LATER.

Danny (who is black): "I mean to be honest, there's not a lot of black faces
needed on television."Maggie:
"Crimewatch…The reconstructions on Crimewatch.
They always need black actors." (Crimewatch is the British
version of America's Most Wanted.)

Maggie (on keeping actors off the extras only lunch bus, overheard by Danny):
"We'll stick to our own, you stick to your own and then we're all happy."

(Trying to convince Andy's Stalker that the random name on a headstone in
a cemetery is that of Andy's mother.)Andy's Stalker: "I didn't know you were jewish." Andy: "Yeah, oysh." Andy's Stalker: "Died in 1953, how old does that make you then?"Andy (obviously doing the math in his head): "At least 52… 52."Maggie: "You don't look it one bit." Andy: "Hard to believe,
isn't it? Just like it's hard to believe that we were just passing my dead
mother's grave who is jewish."

Commercial Interruption
Here's an interesting find I've come across on how ABC is handling their
commercial breaks this season. Take for example last Thursday night's episode
of Night
Stalker…

I broke down the hour when Night Stalker aired into when the television
show's story aired and when commercials were shown. The hour broken down
is (approximately) – 13 minutes story, 4 commercial, 7 story, 4
commercial, 5 story, 4
commercial, 5 story, 4
commercial, 5 story, 4
commercial, 6 story, 3
commercial and 3 story. I broken these numbers into the chart below so that
you can see the comparison between story, and commercials.

As you can see, ABC clearly tries to hook the audience at the top of the hour
with a long stretch of story. Which is fine, except that for the rest of the
hour the audience is "treated" to almost equal blocks of story to commercial.
Though technically ABC is still airing the same amount of commercials to story
as they did last season,
after
that first long stretch of story the rest of the hour feels like it has many
more commercials than the average television drama when the near equal amounts
of
story to commercial ratio pops-up. Which
can't
be
good
for
ABC's
new
batch
of
shows if people start thinking that they're sitting through hours and hours of
commercials.
Does
ABC
really
want
to
turn
viewers
off
to
these
new
shows
by
upsetting
the viewer base just
when
these shows are
at their most vulnerable?

I can only guess that how ABC's handling commercials this year is e a
boon for downloading shows off the iTunes Music Store – commercial
free of course.

iTunes Television Video
About two minutes after I found out about the availability for users of the
iTunes Music Store to purchase television shows online for $1.99, I found
myself purchasing
and downloading the first episode of the second season of the show Lost.
First off, be sure you have the very latest version of Quicktime (7.0.3) installed
as it
is the only one which will play these videos. The shows come in "M4V" format,
the same format iTunes songs come in. Much like the songs, the videos from
iTunes also must be "authorized" to play on each users computer. (I had
no problems transferring and authorizing the video from work to home.)

I am very impressed as to the quality of the video – see the example
below. Whatever Apple is doing to compress the video (200 meg for 40 minutes)
works EXTREMELY well. I was able to view the video at 200% with no real
degradation in quality.

The one downside I see is that as of now, there's no way to burn these videos
to a CD or DVD for viewing in an DVD player. However, I have a sneaking suspicion
that people are hard at work on changing this.

Right now, all episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Night
Stalker and episodes
of two kids shows are online and available for purchase at $1.99 a piece or
$34.99 for a whole season. According to Apple, new episodes of these shows
will be available online the day after they premiere on television.

Legal Television Show Downloads
You can finally legally download and watch television shows on your computer via iTunes. From Stuff Magazine:

You'll be able to buy TV shows from the iTunes Music Store from ABC and Disney (…). Five shows will be available to watch on iPod or computer: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Nightstalker, The Suite Life and some other Disney thang. $1.99 an episode.

Surface
First, let me start by saying that I like the television show Surface. It's the one "aliens in water" series that I watch – I've given up on both Invasion and Threshold long ago. But it's apparent after the first four episodes of the series that the writers of Surface really have a thing for Steven Spielberg.

Not only does a lot of the action take place in the water where large monsters prey on unsuspecting people (Jaws 1975), but there's also a storyline where a young boy has in his possession an infant "water alien" which can emit light from it's body at will (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 1982) and a story about a father who sees evidence of the "water aliens" but no one believes him which causes him to choose to seek the truth of the aliens over his family (Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1977).

Extras
Best lines from episode 2 (aka Episode 3 in the U.S.):
Andy Millman (to a food server who plopped a plate
of food in front of Andy): "Your heart's not in this, is it? Although I
see one of your pubes is."

Actor Ross Kemp: "You'd best not get in a fight with me." Andy Millman: "Or a conversation."

Andy's Agent (On another client): "I go to ITV with Barry, say we want one
million pounds or nothing and they chose nothing. Looking back I shouldn't have
given them the nothing option. I should have said we want one million pounds
or we want 500 pounds."

Andy Millman: "Make sure the phone's on the hook then." Andy's Agent: "You joke about it but it was unplugged for two days. No one noticed."

DVD TuesdayDon't forget, out on DVD this Tuesday (10/11) are two of the best
seasons of
commercial television you're ever going to see – season two of Arrested
Development and the complete first season of Veronica Mars.

Extras for the Veronica Mars dvd include an extended version of
the pilot with an unaired opening sequence and over 20 minutes of unaired scenes.

Extras for the Arrested
Development dvd include commentary on three
episodes,
deleted and extended scenes, a blooper reel and "The Immaculate Election" campaign
videos.

Zodiac
After a (so far) three year absence from making his last movie Panic Room, director David Fincher is (finally) in the process of making his next movie – Zodiac. From a San Francisco Chronicle article:

"Zodiac" is an $80 million movie about the series of killings that has never been solved. To re-create that time, Fincher, the director of the highly stylized "Se7en," Fight Club" and "Panic Room," is taking a more realistic approach -- filming as much as possible in the actual locations where the events took place (San Francisco). (…)

Although "Zodiac" is a retro film, it will be made with cutting-edge technology. One creative choice that is allowing the crew to work faster is Fincher's decision to use the new Grass Valley Viper FilmStream system, a digital video format.

Fincher used the system to shoot a commercial for Hewlett-Packard, and Michael Mann used it to shoot much of "Collateral," the Tom Cruise-Jamie Foxx thriller. But "Zodiac" will be the first Hollywood feature shot entirely on the Viper system.

The last time Dangerous Universe covered director Fincher, he was rumored to have taken the helm of a big screen adaptation of the movie Hard Boiled.

Fort Wayne Reader
Check out my column up over at the Fort Wayne Reader entitled, "The House/Holmes Connection." On the similarities between the characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Gregory House from the television series House, M.D. (The original title of the article was in fact "Sherlock House, M.D." but was changed before publication.)

A History of ViolenceIn A History of Violence, Viggo Mortensen stars as Tom Stall,
a mild mannered restaurant owner who stops a robbery at his establishment killing
the two robbers in the process. (The men are depicted as having killed their
way across the country and were planning on killing everyone in the restaurant
during
the
robbery.) Tom is declared a hero and turns up on all the cable news channels
in the process. For most people this would be their fifteen minutes of fame,
for Tom it's a nightmare in the making.

Tom Stall is really Joey Cusak, a gangster from Philadelphia
who relocated to small town Indiana trying to escape his past. And people from
his
past,
like
Carl
Fogarty
(Ed Harris), aren't the forgiving type. In his past life as "Crazy Joey", Tom
did some really nasty things like when he once tried
to
remove one of Carl's eyes with barbed wire.

As a quote from the movie Magnolia goes, "We may be through with
the past,
but the past ain't through with us."

A History of Violence depicts the act of violence as a type of cancer/disease
that
although might be put in remission, still exists stirring under the surface.
Although
Tom wants his past life as Joey to be over with, he cannot escape the fact that
he is and always will be Joey. And that when the situation dictates Tom will
turn to his old ways of Joey, killing people in the process.

Everything Tom has done since
ceasing to be Joey is (essentially) a lie. As much as Tom would like to deny
it, Joey is the real person and Tom is not.
Or is he? Is change possible? Can we escape our past if we wish? Can we make
a new life simply by choice?

(As a side note, A History of Violence takes place in fictional Millbrook
Indiana. And by the licence plates of the cars driving around Millbrook,
it
would appear as if Millbrook is somewhere in far north-central Indiana. Of course
none of this matters since A History of Violence was in fact shot in
Canada, nowhere near Indiana.)

Serenity – Bert's Review
I remember the day it was canceled. Three years ago the series was faltering
in the ratings and it was just a matter of time before Fox pulled the plug
on one of the best science fiction series of all time. It didn't help that
Fox aired the episodes out of order, only airing the first episode
after the series had been canceled and not airing some of the episodes at all.

It was a depressing time for science fiction. If a series like Firefly couldn't
make it on television what did the future of the genera hold?

But now things have changed. Firefly has been spun
into a theatrical feature entitled Serenity. Life is good. Serenity does Firefly proud.

In Serenity, the crew of the Firefly class vessel Serenity live on the
edges of space doing whatever it takes to earn an honest (or dishonest) living.
The
movie opens with Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) leading the crew of the
Serenity in a bank heist which is interrupted when the Reivers, a cannibal race
of men
whom "rape, kill and eat" people though not necessarily in that order, attack
the town the bank's located in. To put it mildly, the Reivers are the stuff of
nightmare. They have no fear and only wish to hunt down and kill their prey – no
matter what the cost. I was horrified at the true nature of the Reivers,
whom were only alluded to in the series. They are truly men who have become monsters.
They are us and we are them. They make the zombies of the remake Dawn of
the Dead look like pushovers.

Meanwhile, a man known only as "The Operative"
is tasked on tracking down one of the crew of the Serenity – River
(Summer Glau), a person the Alliance, the future government, had manipulated
and turned into something more. She knows things that she shouldn't and this
makes some very powerful men nervous. And The Operative has no qualms about
killing whomever he needs, be it man, woman or child, to get to her.

What follows is the Serenity dodging The Operative and discovering the true
nature of the Reivers in the process. (A horrible, horrible nature indeed.)

If there's one thing that I'm a bit concerned with about the movie it's that
if people who are unfamiliar with the source material will get/like
the movie. I am a Firefly nut and think that Serenity is
one of the best science fiction movie to come along in some time. But what about
people who don't know Firefly from Cheers? Will they like
the movie? I can only hope, I am dying to see a sequel to Serenity. (10/10)

Dangerous Universe has been covering Firefly/Serenity for three
and a half years at this point, and only wishes that we can cover the television
show/movie for four more.

Night Stalker
I noticed the ending of tonight's Night Stalker was
different than the one used on the unaired pilot
episode making the rounds on the Internet
last summer.
It seems as if the original ending had Perri (Gabrielle Union) and Kolchak
(Stuart Townsend) becoming friends, while with the new ending it didn't seem
as if their relationship has evolved that much. I'd have to say that I prefer
the original ending over the one that aired, it seemed more real.

The following contains many spoilers.

THE ORIGINAL ENDING
Previously, Kolchack sprays zinc sulfide outside a girl's school where the
creatures were sighted. He later returns with Perri and Jain to the school
and using a special light is
able
to follow
the creatures' tracks via their zinc sulfide glow in the light. They are
able to follow the tracks all the way to the cave via this glow. Kolchak
uses his GPS device and realizes that the cave is near where Emily's
body was found before driving his Mustang into the cave. Inside the cave
they hear little girl Julie whimpering and find her on the cave's floor.
They are
confronted by two of the creatures and escape to the car by using
the Jain's camera flash disorienting the creatures. The group makes it to the
car but are attacked by the creatures. One leaps on the hood and breaks the
glass. Another smashes the passenger side window and bites Perri. The creatures
are only driven off when the car emerges into
the
sunlight
of
early
morning.

Later, in the hospital where Perri is recovering from her wounds, there
is some discussion about
the mark on the hand, neither Perri or the little girl have it. Why? There
is no answer but Perry tells Kolchak to keep looking.

THE ENDING THAT AIRED
Kolchak, Perri and Jain are sitting in a cafe. Kolchak
is troubled about not being able to find little girl Julie. Perri and Kolchak
discuss the story, when Kolchak's GPS device begins beeping. Previously,
Kolchak sprayed a "chemical Low Jack" outside the girl's school. Using this,
they are able to track these creatures back to the cave via the GPS. Kolchak
uses his GPS device and realizes that the cave is near where Emily's
body was found before driving his Mustang into the cave. Inside the cave
they loose the signal but Kolchak decides to investigate further, pulling
two cattle-prods and a light out of his trunk. Jain remarks, "Don't you have
like a gun or something?" They hear little girl Julie whimpering somewhere
in the cave but there are many nooks and tunnels all around. Jain
gets a scare while poking his head into one of these tunnels when a flock
of bats comes blasting out and accidentally breaks his cattle-prod.
Kolchak delves even deeper into the cave even after hearing the creature
growl. They find Julie perched precariously on a ledge over a large drop.
Kolchak
has the little girl jump across to him all the while the creatures are closing
in on the group. The three make a mad dash to the car. Perri gets her foot
stuck on a root and thinks it one of the creatures for a moment. On the escape,
Jain is grabbed and pulled back but is rescued by Kolchak when he throws
his light at the creature. Jain is wounded on the leg but they all make it
to the car. One of the creatures leaps on the car's hood and breaks the glass,
another smashes the passenger side window and snaps at Perri but is smashed
against the cave wall by Kolchak at the wheel. The car makes it out of the
cave at night and rockets away.

A few days later in the newspaper office, Perri confronts Kolchak about his
story telling him that it doesn't reflect the truth. Perri says that, "The
public has a right to know." Kolchak responds, "The public doesn't want to
know." But Kolchak tells her that when he finds the answers, he will print
them and that the people will have to believe. Perri tells him, "I'm watching
you."

The critically
adored UPN series began its second season in front of its largest audience ever
-- 3.3 million viewers -- Wednesday (Sept. 28), despite airing
in a cutthroat time period dominated by ABC's "Lost." The episode also
scored its highest-ever rating among the network's target audience of young women.

Did I mention that the season opener of Veronica Mars was excellent? Especially
the ending… Wow!

RenewedPrison Break has been renewed for a second season and The Office
(US) has been
renewed for a third. But how exactly can there be a second season of Prison
Break? Is there ANOTHER break out of ANOTHER prison, or do they stay in
the
same
prison
that's (seemingly) broken out of in the first season? Via
Zap2It.

Lost
Here are a few screen caps from tonight's episode of Lost entitled "Adrift."
In case you're wondering, the odd looking photo is a contrast enhanced shot of
the shark that attacked Walt and Sawyer where you can clearly see a logo on
the shark's tail.

"Lost amongst the ruins of a leveled city lies an Emperor Class Titan, a war vessel of untold power forged in the planet-wide furnaces of Mars, and revered by billions as the epitome of Imperial dominance. The one who controls it will command the power to destroy, or defend, a world. The Imperials will summon it to overcome great evil, Chaos will corrupt it for their own designs, Orks will destroy it in their bloodlust and Eldar will disregard it in their arrogance. The expansion pack to the award winning Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War will build upon the most exciting, visceral, front-line battlefield ever seen in an RTS game. Winter Assault promises to be one of the biggest expansion packs ever."

Extras
HBO is running the series Extras a bit out of order. The episode that
ran as the first episode was really the third episode of the series. And next
week the real first episode will run as the second. My guess is that HBO decided
that the funniest of the first three episodes was the third and chose to run
that one first. Oh well, I guess even HBO can't be perfect.

FlightplanFlightplan (2005) is a good movie trapped in a terrible ending. In Flightplan,
Jodie Foster stars as Kyle, a mother who’s child goes missing during a trans-atlantic
flight between Germany and New York. Or does she? Is Kyle’s daughter
missing, or did she really die when Kyle’s husband fell, or jumped, from their
apartment roof?

The first two thirds of the movie is effective as Kyle questions her sanity
as she searches the plane for her daughter, whom seemingly no one else on the
flight
has seen, but finds only questions. Where the movie falls apart, however, is
when we discover the truth about what’s going on. It’s just totally unbelievable.

Battlestar GalacticaTV Squad is reporting that the season finale of Battlestar Galactica will run two minutes long tomorrow (9/23) night:

…Next week, the Sept. 23 episode titled Pegasus, will run two minutes longer than its scheduled time. Set your recording device to continue until five minutes after the scheduled end time of the episode to be on the safe side.

Question: why do Hollywood television producers “Americanize” (recast with American actors and rewrite with American tastes in mind) British television shows? It’s a common enough occurrence. Over the years there’s been some 60 odd shows converted from Queen’s English to American Slang including Three’s Company, Sanford and Son and All in the Family, all based on British television shows.

Quick ReviewsThe Constant Gardner (2005): The Constant Gardner is a good movie,
though it suffers in its length. I felt as if a half hour of the movie could
easily
been
cut out without it hurting the story. (7/10)

Lord of War (2005): Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer who
doesn’t discriminate when it comes to buyers. As he sees it, he’s not involved
in the conflict and is only supplying a good. Even if his “goods” are weapons
used to slaughter both soldiers and civilians alike. (9/10)

The 57th Annual Emmy Awards
Some notable winners and losers from last night's Emmy awards. Everybody Loves Raymond wins for best comedy – or the "we're so sorry to see you go award"!? Ian McShane shut out two years in a row for lead actor in a drama!? Tony Shalhoub wins for lead in a comedy series – wait a minute – Monk's a comedy!? Click for the entire list.

The fifth disc in Battlestar Galactica's season 1 set is highlighted by eight
comprehensive featurettes covering all aspects of the series, from its miniseries
origins to standard surveys of production design, visual effects, and particulars
of plot and character. For hardcore fans and anyone interested in TV production,
nine out of 13 episodes, plus the disc 1 miniseries, are accompanied by intelligent
and informative commentary originally provided as BG website podcasts, mostly
by series developer and writer Ronald D. Moore, who provides tantalizing clues
about developments in season 2. The "Series Lowdown" is a cast-and-crew
promotional program originally broadcast to attract SciFi Channel viewers who
were initially reluctant to embrace a "reimagined" Battlestar Galactica.
The strategy worked: First-season ratings left no doubt that the new BG was as
good as--and in many ways better than--the original.

House
New episodes of the series House might be absent the entire month of October on Fox. Via The Futon Critic:

With the Major League Baseball playoffs less than three weeks away, FOX has firmed up its air schedule for the period. As is typical for the month of October, several of FOX's series will disappear for as many as four weeks.

Getting the shortest end of the stick - Tuesday dramas "Bones" and "House," both of which will get the boot for the entire month, save for only October 18 should the ALCS finish under six games. Nevertheless, in previous years FOX has opted to show repeats, movies or other specials on unused game dates in order to avoid viewer confusion.

Oh well, there's always The Office airing on NBC the same time as House would usually air.

I Am Legend
Is the I Am Legend movie back on? Via Dark Horizons:
Warner Bros. has officially set "Constantine" helmer Francis Lawrence to direct "I Am Legend", finally putting the long awaited film adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel on a fast track into production reports Variety. (…)

Set in Los Angeles after a biological war, the pic centers on the sole healthy survivor, a man who finds himself in a battle against nocturnal mutants. Pic will undergo a rewrite under the supervision of Lawrence, who is eyeing a 2006 start date.

Dangerous Universe has been covering the I Am Legend movie for nearly four years now.

Land of the Dead
Sweet looking cover art for the upcoming unrated DVD release of Land of the Dead. Via DVDAnswers:

The rated edition (runtime 1 hour 33 minutes) will be available in full frame only, whereas the unrated edition (1 hour 37 minutes) will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen. Each will carry English Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 Surround tracks. Extras wise, both discs will carry an audio commentary with George Romero, producer Peter Grumwald and editor Michael Doherty, an Undead Again: The Making of Land of the Dead featurette, A Day with the Living Dead featurette, deleted scenes and a When Shaun met George featurette. The unrated disc will include all of that, along with a Bringing the Dead to Life featurette, a Scenes of Carnage feature, a feature on the Zombie Effects from Green Screen to Finished Scene, a Bringing the Storyboards to Life feature, and a Scream Tests: Zombie Casting Call feature.

The unrated DVD case features the tagline, "The dead shall inherit the Earth." Look for Land of the Dead in stores October 18.

Superman Returns I have decided to make a "Fan Trailer" for the upcoming
Superman Returns (June 30, 2006) I am in the proccess of building some of the
sets. These screen grabs are of the intro scene. A close up of Clark in his
black rimmed glasses standing on a brick floor. Camera pans back to and scene
rotates 90 degrees and you see Clark is standing on the side of a brick building.
Camera pans back further to relieve the "Superman" Logotype built
from bricks and mortar.

Click for H.264 Screen Grab

Click for H.264 Screen Grab

What will make this initial scene work (hopefully) is if the viewer
does not know who the guy is. Just a normal guy, how happens to have a cleft
in his chin. I will try to keep up on the screen grabs as they become available.

In London, Mr. Laurie was known mainly as a comedian who collaborated for
decades with his friend Stephen Fry. The two staged well-received comic revues,
and eventually
wrote and starred in a series based on P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves narratives. These
days, Mr. Laurie is as amazed by his quick success on American television as
he is by the pace of network production schedules in general. (…)

If there's something anguished and lonely about House, a measure of the same
could be said of Mr. Laurie. He hasn't had time to enjoy his success. He is an
absentee father to three children, and frets about making time in a few weeks
to see his 16-year-old son play Kent in "King Lear." Two of his children
are starting new schools, and a few weeks after their monthlong visit this summer,
he speaks rather forlornly about them, and how he never planned to be away all
for so long.

My brother gave me a slight sampling of this show a while back, and ever since then, I've loved every minute of 'em. Check them out on Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, or pick up the DVD's from Amazon. If you got a sick twisted sense of humor, you wont be disappointed.

Well, another Friday upon us. For those of you who want some news, Microsoft has finally alloted into getting a movie based on Halo off the ground

"Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox are reported to have agreed to pay Microsoft $5m plus a percentage of ticket sales capped at 10 per cent of the domestic box office. They reportedly haggled Microsoft down from $15m plus 15 per cent" .Wow, as if Microsoft doesn't have enough money?

Now, not to call down the spell of "Doom (No, not the movie.. I still hope that movie is cool)" on the prospect of releasing this flick, a couple of points need to be addressed before releasing another Straight to Home Video movie. First off, who to pick to play the role of Master Chief? Both the Video game and the novels portray the Master Chief as a bad ass who takes no flak, and dishes out some serious pain. Last I checked, a lot of the actor's out there have already been stereo-typed into other roles. So this will probably be a diffucult role to fill.

Next, is who is going to write the script? The novels written by Eric Nylund were superb, with the action and grit that you would expect from a good Sci-Fi genre. If Universal / Fox want to have a GREAT script, that would be the man I would look up for help!

Last I checked, Fox's track record with Sci-Fi movies hasn't been all that stellar (see my AvP review, if you dare..), so hopefully this wont be a total CGI flick. Though seeing the Covenant on the silver screen will be rather KICK ASS!

As I left the farm with George McGovern and Anita Thompson to deliver a tape
of the ceremony to an Aspen bar where hundreds of Hunter's fans were convened,
we stared out the bus window, and there it was, from three miles down the valley
-- the green orgiastic fist, lighting up the mountain. Jay Gatsby's green light
at the end of the pier had moved west to Hunter S. Thompson Territory. It glowed
in the darkness like a long-ago lighthouse on loan from Haight-Ashbury, blinking
a sentimental farewell, a bizarre hallucinogenic symbol soon to flicker out forever.

Suddenly, the shuttle bus grew hushed. You could hear the wheels humming down
the lonesome Colorado blacktop road. Our transport had become as solemn as an
empty church. No human murmurs or casual asides, just stony silence. As the highway
turned sharply right, putting the phantasmagoric Gonzo fist out of view, the collective
fear of everyone on board was that we had all entered the No More Fun Zone. The
Green Light was temporary. The sorcerer was truly gone. The ashes had settled,
and only the dark shadow of the valley remained.

Ricky's considering doing a run of new radio shows with Steve and Karl which
will be similar to past shows on Xfm but without the music. The shows would
be available free of charge and exclusively online - about a half hour of new
chat each week

We'd really like to know whether people are into this sort of thing before going
ahead so we're hoping you'll be good enough to register your interest (or lack
of) in a simple online poll at...

Veronica Mars
Check out a clip from the premiere episode of season two of Veronica Mars. From
the site:

"Normal is the Watchword"
After the summer fireworks caused by a dangerous confrontation with Lilly Kane's
murderer and a surprising visitor at her door, Veronica attempts to settle into
"normal" life, complete with a new after-school job and a return to the popular
fold at Neptune High.
Veronica an Oh-Niner!?
Say it ain't so! See the video for yourself here.

Space: Above and Beyond
Out of nowhere, a DVD of the incredible series Space: Above and Beyond is due
to be released in Best Buy this Tuesday (9/6). (Please note, the series is a
Best
Buy
exclusive.) It's been ten years since the series originally premiered on Fox,
and I've spent all the time waiting for this, watching the episodes on nearly
unwatchable VHS tapes.

It's the year
2063. After 150 years of deep space exploration, people on Earth feel certain
they are alone in the universe. Everything changes when news comes
that two outposts light-years away from Earth have been attacked by an alien
civilization. Now the new young recruits of the United States Marine Corps Space
Aviator Calvary are headed for the front lines in the toughest battle the world
has ever had to face. Thrust into an intergalactic war, these untested fighter
pilots suddenly find themselves waging a life-and-death struggle to protect Earth
and to save mankind from total annihilation.

5-Disc Set Includes All 23 Episodes-Including
The Double-Length Pilot Episode!

For those of you who have been keeping up with the devastation that Hurricane Katrina has done to the Gulf Region, several agencies including the Department of Homeland Security are reporting that this is a SEVERE emergency and need your donations or assistance by volunteering.

So if you can, please do so, and help out those who are in serious need.

Taking place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950's America,
the film chronicles the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R.
Murrow (David Strathairn) and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American
Activities Committee.

Good Night, And Good Luck stars David Strathairn, George Clooney, Robert
Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson and Jeff Daniels and is also directed by Clooney.

RomeThe first
episode of Rome was interesting, it just wasn't all that great.
In Rome,
there's about a dozen different stories going on all at once and none of those
stories could be called a secondary/"B" story – every
character's story is treated as a main story. In the first season of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano was definitely the "A" story
and everything else was the "B" story. In The Wire there
were two stories going on, the cops and the robbers. In Entourage there's
only really one story going on, the guys.

In Rome there are so many stories and plots going on that I couldn't
tell the "A" story from the "B" and the characters, especially
the women, looked/dressed so much alike that I had problems telling them apart.
Still, I found myself interested in the stories of the Roman soldiers. But I'm
not sure that's enough to bring me back week after week. (7/10)

Ohhhhhh Boy... Alrighty, first off, Id like to let it be known that I'm writing this little *ahem* review of this so called movie on request by my lovely bride to be Kristin. So with out further ado.. Welcome to the world of BAD ACTING!!

Our story starts off with Christian Slater as Edward Carnby, a paranormal detective on the hunt for various relics from the Abskani, a long forgotten tribe who foretold that demons are coming back to take over the world.

Ok, so the story starts humming along with good ole Edward running into several of the "demons" that have taken over humans as hosts, and now have supernatural abilities. The Demons are after Edward for the artifacts, that apparently open a doorway/staircase/BatCave to their "Alternate Universe". Now, considering every decent young American male in the U.S. has played "Resident Evil" on some gaming platform, you know damn well to aim for the head when trying to kill something that supposively cant be killed, AND you use a shotgun.

Ok, so have I lost you yet? Along the way, Edward runs back into his ex-girlfriend played by Tara "Oops my Boob fell out!" Reid. She apparently is a apprentice museum scientist who has all the answers to Carnby's riddles. Or so we think! Come to find out that early in Edward's life, he was subject to the same experiments that created the superhuman/demons. And now, all of Edwards' old chums from the orphanage where he grew up are coming to hunt him down, trying to get the stupid artifacts.

OK if the movie couldnt get any more worse, along comes Stephen Dorff as "Commander Blake" ( I guess Stephen felt the need to be a good guy this time around, since the last time I saw him acting, it was in the original Blade.) Dorff is head of a para-military outfit charged with monitoring all supernatural activity in the continental U.S.. And of course, he's chums (in a slap you up side your head kinda way) with Carnby. Blake informs Carnby that the "Ectoplasmic activity" (or some BS) is at a high level, and something big is about to go down. He also shows Carnby that the only thing that can kill the "Shadow Demons" (which ill mention later for coolness) is Light Bullets??

*At this point in the movie, I slowly began reaching for the small dip knife we had lying on our coffee table. Kristin was nice enough to remind me that the movie wasn't that bad to take my own life for... CLOSE but not enough..* Anyhow, Carnby, Blake, Tara "Oops it did it again!" discover the hidden underground temple to where the Abskani (Obscure ?? Absent?? Abysmal?!) tribe had their secret portal to the other dimension. The three decide that it would be a good idea to go and visit it while Blake's entourage (assorted Red-shirted Away team members from Star Trek need not apply) guard the area.

Had enough yet?? Well, as the trio make their way down into the temple, the "Shadow Demons" show up and begin storming the front lines of the Military. Of course, the Military gives back what it gets, but in the end, you can't mess with the Shadow Demons. They end up over-running the military and destroying the entire camp setup around the temple's entrance.

Meanwhile, the trio have discovered the entrance to the temple, AND discovered a secret operation room where Carnby and his orphan buddies were taken to to be "Joined" with the Demon bugs. Carnby then discovers the sealed portal to the alternate universe, and decides "Hey the Artifacts can be put together and make a key! Lets open the door to Hell!!" On the heels of this notion comes Blake saying "Hey, maybe we should just blow them all to hell with a little C4.?" Hey, the Plot's reaching, the portal is like 8000 SuperDome's wide... SURE! A little C4 might just make the bad Demons happy!

SO, Doorways Open, they set the charge, and run off.. But WAIT! the Remote to the charge doesnt work, Blake's gotta go back and set the countdown timer on the charge! (Thankfully this ends the acting of Stephen Dorff, cause he either dies or gets eaten by the Shadow Demons). Carnby and Tara "The Milk's Gone Bad!" make their way up a conveniently found ladder to the outside world. They think they are safe... Are they??

After seeing this horrific piece of garbage, I promptly took out the DVD and sacrificed it to the oven. In light of that moment, I also came up with several other good uses for the DVD, (if you had purchased it..): Skeet shooting, Frisbee, Dog Pooh pickeruper, ninja stars..

Acting in this flick was non existant, the characters were horribly portrayed, the plot has more holes in it than AOL's online Security system. The only cool kinda thing that came out of this flick was the Shadow demons, somewhat of a variation to the original Giger Alien, although they couldnt be seen in normal light. Least they did some damage by killing a lot of stupid people off. A shame it isn't for real.. the Gene pool would be in the plus column for a change!

Please, Don't rent this movie. Don't Buy this movie. Don't even LOOK at this movie. Just leave it there, along with the 400 other copies of it at Blockbuster/Wal-Mart/Zip and Go. If you truly want info, please gouge your eye's out after viewing the site link below...

The 40 Year Old VirginThe 40 Year Old Virgin is a funny movie intended for adult
audiences, hence the “R” rating. It’s refreshing to finally see some comedies
(at least) returning a to the more hard-edged end of the genera spectrum.

In The 40 Year Old Virgin, Andy Stizer (Steve Carell) has spent the
last 40 years not “getting any,” living alone in a toy filled apartment. That
is until some of Andy's co-workers discover one night at a poker game that he’s
still
a
virgin and decide to help him out.

What follows is Andy going on some pretty funny dating adventures but finding true love by himself in a woman (Catherine Keener) who just happens to work across the way selling items on eBay.

Much of the comedy from the movie comes from Andy being in embarrassing situations.
Be it trying to put a condom on for the first time or going on a speed-dating
lunch where he meets a woman named “Gina,” who pronounces the “G” like “J” in “Joke,” who’s
spent a lot of time with women in the past but wants to start dating men again.
And since she thinks Andy look a bit feminine…

Though the movie is far from perfect, it has some hilarious moments and doesn’t
feel as long as it really is.

The 40 Year Old Virgin writer/director/producer Judd Apatow must like casting
actors he’s used in the past. For example, one of Andy’s co-worker friends Cal
is played by Seth Rogan whom co-starred in Apatow’s television shows Freaks
and Geeks (1999) and was a writer on and co-star of another Apatow television
show Undeclared (2001). Carla Gallo (Carnivàle) and Loudon
Wainwright also co-starred in Undeclared and had bit parts in The 40
Year Old Virgin.

In fact Carell co-starred in Anchorman: The Legend of Run Burgundy (2004),
which
Apatow produced, alongside
Paul Rudd whom plays Andy's friend David in The 40 Year Old Virgin.
David Koechner also starred in Anchorman as Champ Kind and turns up in a bit
part on The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Not to be outdone, Leslie Mann (The Cable Guy) had a part in the movie
and is the real-life wife of Apatow. (8/10)

Fall Television
The 2005-2006 fall television season kicks off next Monday (8/29) with the two-hour
premiere of Fox's Prison Break. The
show is described as:

MICHAEL SCOFIELD (Wentworth Miller, "The Human Stain") is a desperate
man in a desperate situation. His brother, LINCOLN BURROWS (Dominic Purcell,
"John Doe," "Blade: Trinity"), is on death row and scheduled
to die in a few months for a murder Michael is convinced Lincoln did not commit.
With no other options and time winding down, Michael holds up a bank to get
himself incarcerated alongside his brother in Fox River State Penitentiary.
Once he's inside, we learn that Michael is a structural engineer with the blueprints
for the prison and has hatched an elaborate plan to break Lincoln out and prove
his innocence.

In my estimation, Prison Break owes much of it's being on the
air to ABC's Lost, in that Prison Break is Fox's attempt at
having a series where the story slowly unfolds over the course of the season
akin to Lost rather that in traditional episodic format. If you miss
the premiere of the series next Monday don't worry, Fox will reair the two-hour
pilot on Thursday (9/1) while FX will air a marathon of episodes at the end
of October. (That is if the series lasts that long.)

Summer Movies
Why have people stopped going to the theater this summer? Could it be the ringing
cell phones, talking kids, ridiculous ticket prices*, insane concession prices,
busy
parking
lots,
and
twenty
minutes of commercials followed by twenty minutes of movie trailers? From
the
New York Times:

Multiples theories for the decline abound: a failure of studio marketing, the
rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence
of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many
movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something
more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say,
just are not good enough. (…)

overall movie attendance, a figure not affected by inflation, has slid to below
where it stood in mid-August 2001. DVD sales, while still robust, are no longer
rising exponentially, and some analysts say that a poor box office performance
this summer will lead to poor DVD sales this winter. (…)

With billions of dollars at stake, nerves are growing understandably frayed.
Last week, John Fithian, the president of the National Association of Theatre
Owners, accused Robert A. Iger , the incoming chief executive of Walt Disney,
of leveling a "death threat" at theater owners for having suggested
that the lesson to be drawn from the slump is that moviegoers want films to be
accessible in theaters and on DVD simultaneously. (…)

I actually enjoy going to the movies, I find a night spent in the multiplex enjoyable. What
I don't like is all the garbage associated with the trip.

* How does this math work, a ticket for a movie in a theater costs
around $7.50 where I live yet I can buy that same movie, and watch it over and
over again,
for just the price of a couple of tickets if I wait for it to come out on DVD?

Land of the Dead
Look for the Land of the Dead DVD to be released on October,
18. From
DVDAnswers:

The rated edition (runtime 1 hour 33 minutes) will be available in full frame
only, whereas the unrated edition (1 hour 37 minutes) will be presented in 2.35:1
anamorphic widescreen. (…) Extras wise, both discs will carry an audio commentary
with
George Romero, producer Peter Grumwald and editor Michael Doherty, an Undead
Again: The Making of Land of the Dead featurette, A Day with the Living Dead
featurette, deleted scenes and a When Shaun met George featurette. The unrated
disc will include all of that, along with a Bringing the Dead to Life featurette,
a Scenes of Carnage feature, a feature on the Zombie Effects from Green Screen
to Finished Scene, a Bringing the Storyboards to Life feature, and Scream Tests:
Zombie Casting Call.

Six Feet Under
Kudos to Alan Ball on the last episode of Six Feet Under. I
wasn't
all
that
crazy about the episode overall, but the end, where we learn the fates of all
the characters, was enlightening/interesting/creepy/cool/innovative all at the
same time.

Rome
The New York Times has delivered a mixed/negative review of the series Rome,
set to start airing on HBO next Sunday (8/28). From
the review:
"Rome" has magnificent sets and delicious small touches (…).
But somewhere along the Appian Way, HBO lost its nerve(…).

It's as if the creators felt obliged to keep the pace stately and the characters
one-dimensional because they didn't trust their audience to follow the basic
plot: aristocrats want to prevent Caesar from seizing power in order to preserve
their privileges and corrupt practices. (…)

The success of "The Sopranos," and "Six Feet Under," and
more recently, "Deadwood," lies in the way they paint sweeping, deeply
layered psychological themes into the most humble, inauspicious frames: a mob
family in New Jersey, a family-run funeral parlor in Los Angeles. Even "Deadwood"
is just a 19th-century frontier town. (…)

"Rome," takes on an entire civilization and whittles it down to less
than its ruins.

Gervais in New York Times
The New York Times has a nice profile on Ricky Gervais, and information on Extras set to start airing on HBO September 25. From
the interview:

He (Gervais) compares his life now with his father's.

"When I start feeling sorry for myself, sitting in an air-conditioned hotel
doing two hours' work, I remember he used to get up at 5:30 in the morning and
never missed a day's work," Mr. Gervais says. "I think that's why money
gives me the creeps. It's embarrassing enough to get paid a thousand times a nurse's
wages for just mucking around; the best I can do is take it deadly seriously,
the actual work, put everything I can in it."

"The first year I did this I made more money than I ever thought I would
and I got offered a million to do this advert in America," Mr. Gervais adds
later. "I said no and they came back and said, 'How about $2 million?' I
said no, it doesn't matter what it is, because, it just doesn't, how much money
do you need?"

(Kevin) Smith (…) has taken a guest role on UPN's "Veronica Mars."
He'll appear in the show's second episode this season, which is currently filming
and is scheduled to air Wednesday, Oct. 5.

The "Clerks" writer-director will be playing, appropriately enough,
a convenience-store clerk named Duane Anders. He meets Veronica (Kristen Bell)
when she comes to question him in the course of an investigation -- into what,
UPN and producer Warner Bros. TV aren't saying.

"I thought people would like (Undeclared) because it was funny, at
least to me," Apatow recalls. "I thought it was well done. I was very
excited about it."

"We were supposed to premiere about two weeks after 9/11," says Apatow.
"So they had this great ad campaign happening and we were on after 'That
'70s Show' and it felt like everything was in place, but suddenly the entire
world changed and suddenly our little show didn't seem important at all. It
was actually very hard to even want to make the show anymore, because something
so much more important was happening. We had to kinda get back in the head of
thinking it was important to make jokes."

People of Mars, you say we are brutes and savages. But let me tell you one
thing: if I could get loose from this cage you have me in, I would tear you guys
a new Martian asshole. (…) You may kill me, either on purpose or by not
making sure that all the surfaces in my cage are safe to lick. But you can’t
kill an idea. And that idea is: me chasing you with a big wooden mallet.

Battlestar GalacticaRon
Moore has updated his "Battlestar Galactica Blog". It's amazing
that there are so many little details go into a show such as Battlestar Galactica,
and that many of these details are there to build the show rather to be spoon-fed
to the audience:
"that thing that adama and starbuck say:
"morning starbuck, whatdya hear?"
"nothin' but the rain."
"Grab your gun and bring the cat in."
my friend and I have made up our own little meaning/interpretation for it, and
use it on a pretty regular basis (parts of it). but what does it mean to those
characters? and how did the writers come up with it?"

I came up with this in the miniseries, and it's essentially a riff on contemporary
marching chants or cadences used in the military called, "jodies." You've
seen them in films: the platoon is marching or jogging along and the drill instructor
sings out something like, "Up in the morning in the rising sun/Gonna run
all day 'til the running's done," and the platoon either repeats the lines
or adds the next line in the jodie. (…) In that opening scene, Kara is jogging
through the corridors of Galactica and Adama greets her with a line that is a
reference to an old jodie that presumably each of them remembers from their own
training. So it's kind of an in-joke reference that they share with each other
which probably in turn has some even deeper private joke between the two of them.
(…)

Jarhead (the self-imposed moniker of the Marines) follows "Swoff"
(Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp
to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back
through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi
soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow
Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing
desert fields in a country they don't understand against an enemy they can't
see for a cause they don't fully fathom.

Foxx portrays Sergeant Sykes, a Marine lifer who heads up Swofford's scout/sniper
platoon, while Sarsgaard is Swoff's friend and mentor, Troy, a die-hard member
of STA-their elite Marine Unit. An irreverent and true account of a war that
was antiseptically packaged a decade ago, Jarhead is laced with dark wit, honest
inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd.

Sierra has released the demo for F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon), a Hyper-action / Horror First Person Shooter, with kind of an X-files feel to it. I got a chance to try it out Monday night, and from what I got to try out, its not all that great.

Now, mind you, this could be due to my PC being a little *ahem* outdated. However, I still wasn't impressed with the whole gameplay of the demo. Sure, you get to blast stormtrooper-like guards full of holes, the games' aspect of FPS didnt really appeal to me.

You could probably chalk it up to me playing Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 Expansion pak too much, but then again, in comparison, the graphics, the game play, and the overall "zest" of F.E.A.R just does not compare to the other two.

Granted both Doom3 and Half-Life 2 have set a standard PRETTY high, F.E.A.R has been in development (and from what I understand still in development) for quite some time. Using the Monolith gaming engine (its real name eludes me at the moment..), you would think that Sierra would raise the standards bar set by Doom3 and Half-Life 2. Unfortunately, that isnt the case.

I do like the silly antics of the AI, with the crazy Comm Chatter "Im heading for cover!" "WHERE?!", along with their attempts to take new positions to try and attack you. However, squatting down behind the same box I saw you duck behind, then popping back up, doesnt really make for intelligent tactics. It really makes for me to put a bullet in their brain pan.

There also is the capability to slow down time, a Matrix-esque style of fighting, or Max Payne. This does help a little when trying to put new holes in the upholstery, but you can still get tagged in the process. What fun is that?

Anyhow, try it out when you get a chance... And if you got enough horsepower in your PC. Cause it will need it.

The Office (U.S.)
NBC will be running four episodes from season one of the U.S. version of The
Office. (Since the entire season was only six episodes long, why not all
of the episodes instead of four?) From The
Futon Critic:

NBC will air a mini-marathon of four previously telecast episodes of the
critically-acclaimed mockumentary, "The Office," on August 17 (8-10
p.m. ET), hosted by Steve Carell…

"The Office" party will be hosted by Carell who will appear in interstitials
to tease his upcoming feature-film comedy, "The 40 Year-Old Virgin."

Gervais, the creator of "The Office" and an avowed fan of "The
Simpsons," wrote and will guest star in an episode of the long-running FOX
series this season. He says his appearance on the show fulfills a goal he set
when he started his career.

The episode, tentatively scheduled for early 2006,
will find Gervais playing
a character similar to his clueless "Office" manager, David Brent.
He and Homer (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) will trade places for a week as part
of a "Wife Swap"-style show.

Arrested Development
Fox will air four episodes of Arrested Development this Friday (7/29)
and each subsequent Friday until August, 26 August, 12 airing every episode from last season. From the Balboa Observer:

7/29 8:00 P.M. (EST) "The One Where Michael Leaves",
"The One Where They Build A House", "Amigos", "Good Grief"

Season 3 of Arrested Development starts Monday September 19 at 8:00 P.M.
(EST). (Which, of course, Fox in it's ultimate wisdom puts Arrested Development on
Fridays after moving it from Sundays before it's final home on Mondays.)

Over There
I happened to notice on last night's premiere episode of Over There once
child-actor Patrick Renna was featured as a medic. (Renna is now in his mid-20s
and probably doesn't much like being referred to as a "child-actor"
anymore.) He starred in movies such as Son in Law (1993) and acted in
one of the more memorable episodes of The X-Files.

Saw this as I was snooping around for more MST3k vids online, and to be honest, its SO true. I cant tell you how many times I've seen that movie, and laughed my head off.
The movie is indeed horrible, but with the cast of MST3k doing their best work to make fun of it, it has become a classic in my library. I cant tell you how many times Bert and I have cried from laughing at this flick!

Here's an exerpt from the article in the El Paso Times:

Much-maligned 'Manos' gains new following

Erica Molina
El Paso Times

In the summer of 1966 a group of El Pasoans gathered at an East Side ranch to make a Hollywood-style horror movie, but their accomplishment went far beyond their intentions.

Thousands love this film today, and not because " 'Manos' The Hands of Fate" was scary. It was frighteningly bad.

"It lived down to my expectations," Las Cruces resident Jeff Berg said recently of the flick made on a bet by El Paso fertilizer salesman Harold "Hal" P. Warren.

The movie was featured in the June 10 issue of Entertainment Weekly as "the worst movie ever made" -- a distinction it received from voters at the Internet Movie Database (www. imdb.com).

"This thing will not die. It just will not die," said Bernie Rosenblum, one of the few who worked on "Manos" still in the area.

A recent check of IMDb.com showed that "Manos" had fallen to number two on its list of worst movies, behind 1996's "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders" -- an event that shocked both site watchers and Rosenblum...

Incidentally, if anyone has some extra MST3k tapes lying about, and they either wanna give em away, or want to trade episodes, email me or Bert with the subject titled "MST3k -KEEP CIRCULATING THE TAPES!!"

The Island
I must admit the only reason I saw The Island in the first place
was because a new theater opened up near my home and I wanted to check out the
new facilities.
Since
there
was
nothing
that
I specifically
wanted to see, I
had
a
choice
of
movies I could check out. I could have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The
Wedding Crashers or The Island – all new movies I had about
equal
desire in seeing.
About
a
half
hour
into The
Island,
I wished
I had made a better choice.

In The Island, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta
(Scarlett Johansson) realize that they're not living in one of the only two protected
enclaves
left
to humanity after an outside apocalypse, but are instead clones being housed
for
organ
donation
until
the
originals on the outside living in a futuristic America call in an order. What
follows is Lincoln and Jordan running from mercenaries lead by Albert Laurent
(Djimon
Hounsou)
who
will
literally
stop at nothing until the clones are killed. The public at large believes the
clones are "vegetables" with no conscience of their own and (apparently) this
secret must be kept at all costs.

Essentially, The Island is a modern day retelling of Logan's Run (1976).
Except in The Island, people living within the confines of the community
disappear when they win "the lottery" and seemingly go to the last paradise
on
Earth, "the
island", rather than
when they turn 30.

Laurent pulls no punches when the hunt commences. His men murder a technician
from the facility when he helps the two escaped clones get on a train – rather
than, say, detaining him and questioning him about his knowledge of the clones
and where they're going.

But these types of nonsensical/dumb-headed moves permeate the soul of The
Island.
Like why the clones aren't just kept in a state of suspended animation instead
of being allowed to form a society before being murdered for parts?* Or why Laurent
and his men simply don't try to detain the clones rather than having risky shoot-outs
in the middle of downtown L.A. drawing the police? Or where the police go
when in the middle of a shoot-out Laurent and his men simply get in their cars
and drive off without being chased or even shot at?

I kept getting the feeling that if Laurent and his men had simply tried to capture
Lincoln
and Jordan they would have been a lot more successful. (And the movie would have
been a lot shorter.)

I could go on, and on and on. But if there's a movie this year worse than The
Island I will be surprised. (3/10)

*The explanation is so nonsensical (that organs failed if the person housing
them didn't experience life) that I literally laughed out loud at the quote.

Extras
The follow-up series to Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais' icon The Office began airing on BBC in the UK last Thursday. This new series, entitled Extras,
follows Andy Millman (Gervais) and Maggie Jacobs (Ashley Jenson) as they struggle
to make the move from having "extra" parts in movies to full featured
speaking roles. (An "extra" is recognized as essentially background
actors who have no lines – scene fillers really.)

If the first episode of the series is any indication as to the quality we can
expect from the rest of the show, then we're going to be in for a great ride.
I laughed throughout the show and cringed at some of the more uncomfortable
moments
on the set of the faux movie Millman and Jacobs worked on. Only the comedy team
of
Merchant/Gervais
would
ever
attempt, and succeed really, at poking fun at genocide. My stomach literally
sank
when Millman called an asian lady "yellow skinned."

In the first episode of Extras, Millman and Jacobs have extras parts
in a Ben Stiller movie set during the Bosnian War. Stiller plays the role in
a
self deprecating manner, spouting off previous box office totals of movies he's
starred while also pointing a fake pistol at a child actor's mother's head to
get him to stop laughing during a scene. Ben says, "If I shot your mother
in the face would I make you laugh?" (I never knew I could laugh so hard
at a gun pointed at a child's head.)

The really funny bits of Extras comes from the character's selfish natures.
(A jab at the film industry?) Millman wants so bad to have a line in the movie
that he's willing to bribe the man the movie's based on with gift certificates
if he'll talk to Stiller about getting a line in the movie. This transaction
occurs
as
the
man
cries over photos of his slain family. Jacobs is infatuated with a man working
on the set of the movie, until she discovers via Millman that one of the man's
legs is shorter than the other.

Extras runs a paltry six episodes long this season, much like each season
of The Office. If Merchant and Gervais have one thing down pat it's the
axiom of leaving the audience wanting more. (10/10)

Ben Stiller on directing a movie about a man who rescues a child during the Bosnian
war:

Ben, "If I find a little orphan child in a war-zone hiding in a burnt out
building, his parents murdered. Persecuted for his race, his religion… What
am I gonna do? Pop on Dodgeball on DVD?"

Man, "It's a funny film."

Ben, "Thanks. And I CAN put on Dodgeball and he's
gonna laugh for an hour and thirty-two minutes. You know, escape reality for awhile.
But what happens when the film finishes? How do I help him? Put on Dodgeball again? Sure. He's going to laugh again, see things he didn't see the first
time around… It's layered like that. But, this can't go on indefinitely."

Land of the Dead Toys
Apparently, there are some interesting looking Land of the Dead toys due out
sometime soon. Via
Action-Figure:

While still in development, the movie figures will be released under SOTA
Toys’ Now
Playing lineup of 7” scale figures. Tentatively scheduled are figures of
zombie “leader” Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), Blade (Tom Savini) and
Cholo (John Leguizamo) with a fourth figure to be announced at a later date.

Night Stalker
The pilot for ABC's revival of the Night Stalker series is not as bad
as other reviews are saying. Heck, parts of it were even good.

In Night Stalker, reporter Carl Kolchak (Stuart Townsend) uses his
credentials as a crime reporter to investigate a series of murders, including
that of his wife, which may or may not be related. One clue seems to be the
presence of a lightning-bolt shaped scar on the wrists of some of the victims.

The pilot episode focuses on the murder of a pregnant woman, the attack of her
sister in-law and the kidnapping of the sister in-law's daughter. Kolchak and
reporter Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union) investigate the murder and kidnapping,
but Reed suspects that Kolchak might himself be the attacker with all his inside
information on the killings and room in his home full of morgue photos of murder
victims at his home. Reed quickly, and painfully, learns that Kolchak really
isn't the man behind the murders as they work together to quickly unravel where
the kidnapped girl might be.

Night Stalker is shot in Collateral/Robbery
Homicide Division style on digital video looking very harsh, overblown
and dark at times. (Which I personally like.) Parts of the episode were creepy
and, although Night Stalker (2005) bears little resemblance to the
original The
Night Stalker (1972), I would say that Townsend does a good job in
the Kolchak role. Night Stalker "feels" a lot like Millennium (1996) with copious corpses, murders and overall violence. (Almost a
decade ago Millennium sparked protests when it first started airing on Fox.
I can only
imagine in an age of "family values" a show like Night Stalker airing on a "family" network like ABC is bound to also spark
protests.)

The pilot episode does suffer from some flaws, though. Some of the writing is
was just not up to snuff. Characters act in ways that seem to have more bearing
on keeping the story moving rather than their own motivations and the cave location
at the end seemed to be a bit too car friendly.

The major weakness of the show is it's almost carbon copy nature to The
X Files (1993). Both characters of Kolchak (2005) and Fox Mulder are
trying to unravel a mystery surrounding a close family member's deaths/disappearance.
Perri Reed and Dana Scully are both logical, thinking foils to the main characters
belief in the unknown/paranormal. And, in both The X-Files and Night
Stalker a shadowy government agency works against the lead characters
to keep whatever is going on a mystery.

Still, it's not as bad as it sounds. When Night Stalker starts airing
Thursdays this fall on ABC, I will be watching. (8/10)

Finally, the movie directed and portrayed like it should be! I finally got a chance to catch "Batman Begins" over the weekend with Kristin, and let me tell you, the first 2 renditions of "Batman" fail in comparison. (I dont even count the last 2 Batman flicks as "entertainment", more like second-hand circus clowns).

Batman Begins starts out with the explanation of how Bruce Wayne began his quest to seek justice, and how he got his overall training. (All I can say is GREAT JOB ON THE NINJAS!!!) After Bruce finds himself, he decides to return to Gotham City in order to save it from the corrupt, Criminal gangsters who already own half the city.

As the story progresses, Bruce begins to develop his own weaponry, along with the idea of a new alter-ego for himself. One that will strike fear in the hearts of his enemies. He begins by taking down one of the prominent mob bosses in town, and also becomes aquainted with Sgt. Gordon, a honest to goodness cop.

We also get introduced to the good Dr. Crane, who's alter ego is actually known as "Scarecrow". Scarecrow begins using his potent hallucinogen to strike fear in the good people of Gotham. However, Scarecrow has something even more sinister up his sleeve for Gotham.

Rather than spoil the rest of the movie for ya (Just go see it, its worth it!!), Ill let you be the judge for yourself. As far as the acting goes, Christian Bale portays Bruce Wayne perfectly. Cillian Murphy is an awesome Scarecrow. Overall, the acting pulled out the stops for this flick!

Check it out while its still in theaters! This will be a must-get DVD for me!

Battlestar Galactica
Season two of Battlestar Galactica premiered last Friday (7/15) on
the Sci Fi Channel. I am happy to report that season two looks and feels much
like the first season
– science fiction doesn't get much better than this.

The first episode of season two, "Scattered," begins seconds after
the season one finale. Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) has been shot
and mortally wounded after a Cylon infiltrator, Boomer (Grace Park), has gotten
close enough to strike. Meanwhile, pilots Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) and Helo
(Tahmoh Penikett) are stranded on Cylon-occupied Caprica with another copy
of the Boomer Cylon whom Starbuck wants to kill while Helo wants to protect
since it's carrying his
child. On Kobol,
the crew of a downed
Raptor transport must deal with wounded comrades, Cylon soldiers and Doctor
Baltar (James Callis) who speaks with Six, a Cylon only he can see. To top
it all off, on The Galactica, Colonial Tigh (Michael Hogan) is forced into
command of the ship and entire fleet after President Roslin (Mary McDonnell)
was thrown
in jail after an attempted
power grab while at the same time realizing that when The Galactica jumped
to another part of the galaxy to stave off a Cylon attack, they accidentally
jumped to different
coordinates than every other vessel in the fleet.

If there's one thing that the Battlestar Galactica series is good at it's keeping
multiple storylines going all at once. At no point did I feel as if I were
being cheated out of a story, while at the same time, if anything, I'd become
so engrossed in whatever story was being told that I could hardly be pulled
away to see what was going on elsewhere. I was extremely happy that this episode
didn't simply tie up all the loose ends of the current story, as so many
shows do, to more easily get into telling new ones.

Watching Battlestar Galactica is a bit like being spoiled by great writing.
Hopefully, the writing in Battlestar Galactica will cause writers on other
shows to take their writing "to the next level." Which begs the question, is Battlestar Galactica the most important
show on television?
(9/10)

Battlestar GalacticaThere
is an
interesting article on Battlestar Galactica is
up over at The New
York Times. It discusses series creator
Ronald
D.
Moore's
journey
through
the
ranks of being
a writer on various Star Trek series, Richard Hatch's own attempt
at reviving
the series in the late 1990's ala Star Trek: The Next Generation,
the Bryan Singer
and Tom DeSanto attempt at Battlestar Galactica over at Fox television
around that same time and
Moore and David
Eick's
eventual
revival
of the series starting in late '01.

What I find most interesting in the article was Battlestar Galactica's
parallels
to Star Trek Voyager, Ron Moore worked on the show some of the first
season,
and the Battlestar Galactica fans initial negativity (me included)
surrounding his
changes
to the show.

Having made its debut first as a miniseries in late 2003 and then having its
premiere as an original series this past January, ''Battlestar Galactica'' is
the most successful original program in the Sci Fi Channel's history. Meanwhile,
many of the fan sites that had originally opposed Moore and Eick's vision now
actively or passively support it. Discussion of the show has migrated somewhat,
from the fan boards to political blogs, where the issues it raises about security,
religion and the ethics of android torture inspire heated debate, as well as
praise from conservatives and liberals alike.

But there are some remaining diehards.
''I will never support the MooreRon,'' John DiPalermo wrote to me. ''Maybe I'm
stubborn and pigheaded, but . . . Starbuck
is a MAN!!!!!'' He said he prayed every day that Moore would lose his job, and
he said he had also felt angry at his former rebel leader, Hatch. Because after
the miniseries was a success and the first season was green-lighted, Moore e-mailed
Hatch and again offered him a new role. And this time Hatch accepted.

Zap2it Articles
Two interesting articles have appeared on Zap2it this morning. The first reveals
that Charisma Carpenter (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Steve Guttenberg
(Police Academy) will be seen on next season's Veronica Mars.

Carpenter, last seen in several episodes of "Charmed," will have
a recurring part on the UPN show's second season. The series has also signed
up '80s movie star Steve Guttenberg ("Police Academy," "Three
Men and a Baby") for a recurring role.

Both will appear in "Veronica's" second-season premiere this fall;
Carpenter has signed for a minimum of six episodes, and Guttenberg will appear
in at least seven shows.

The second article reveals a bit more about ABC's upcoming revival of The
Night Stalker – retitled Night Stalker.

When Frank Spotnitz ("The X-Files") took on the task of bringing "The
Night Stalker" into the 21st century -- an irony, since "X" creator
Chris Carter cited the show as an influence -- he knew that just chasing monsters
wasn't enough. In an era of terrorist attacks and a 24-hour-news cycle that
runs on child abductions and serial killers, the bar for evil had been set a
lot higher.

So in his version of "The Night Stalker," coming to ABC this fall,
Spotnitz made his Kolchak younger and more sexy, casting Irish heartthrob Stuart
Townsend, as well as darker and more troubled.

Kolchak's wife was the victim, so he says, of supernatural evil (the FBI is
more inclined to suspect Kolchak himself), and now he's obsessed with discovering
how his personal tragedy fits into a larger picture of mayhem and destruction.
And what's up with those jagged red marks on the wrists of Kolchak and many
of the victims?

Land of the Dead
Next month (8/17) IDW Publishing is releasing a Land of the Dead comic
book.

Presenting a special five-part adaptation of George Romero’s long-awaited
zombie movie, set years in the future after the end of his Dead trilogy. In Land
of the Dead, the walking dead roam an uninhabited wasteland and the living try
to lead “normal” lives behind the walls of a fortified city. A new
society has been built by a handful of enterprising, ruthless opportunists, who
live in the towers of a skyscraper, high above the hard-scrabble existence on
the streets below. But outside the city walls, an army of the dead is evolving.
Inside, anarchy is on the rise. With the very survival of the city at stake, a
group of hardened mercenaries is called into action to protect the living from
an army of the dead.

The 2004-2005 Primetime Emmy Award Nominations
The 2005 Emmy Awards were announced this morning, and both the ABC Lost and Desperate Housewives powerhouses were nominated for nine-billion
awards each – a new record. Some other interesting shows were nominated
for awards too.

In the comedy genera, Arrested Development and Scrubs were nominated
for best comedy while Jason Bateman and Zach Braff of those shows respectively
got the nods for lead in a comedy series. Jeffery Tambor and Jessica Walter of Arrested Development were nominated for supporting actor and actress
too.

For drama series, both Deadwood and Lost were nominated for
outstanding drama while Hugh Laurie and Ian McShane of House and Deadwood respectively were nominated for outstanding lead actor in a drama. House was also nominated for casting, makeup, music composition, writing and main title
design.

Battlestar Galactica earned two nominations in special visual effects
in episodes "33" and "The Hand of God."

In a "man I hope they win again" moment, The Office Special was nominated for made for TV movie. (Which is a bit odd since it was originally
broadcast as two separate episodes of a television series.)

Conspicuously absent from the list was Veronica Mars. I can't believe
that Kristen Bell didn't get nominated for lead actress, or in fact, almost any
of the cast for that matter for acting. I'd even go as far as to say that Veronica
Mars deserved a nod for best drama series.

Gervais takes pressure off himself by never letting anything out of his control,
and by keeping it a cottage industry. 'Ego is a dangerous thing,' he says. 'The
day you wake up and think, "Of course I could make a film like The Matrix" is also the day you hope a voice somewhere will still be saying, "Aw, Rick, settle down, what you are good at is very small-scale comedy, stick to that."'

In a way, The Office was a comedy about bad comedy, using up all the cringe-making unfunniness - the obvious impressions, and knee-jerk politics - he had witnessed in his 'years and years standing round a student bar hearing bad comedians getting rounds of applause. If a comedian tells me that sometimes politicians are corrupt or dictators are bad, my reaction will be: no shit, never thought of that before. I have no interest in telling people that George W is not all he might be. For that reason my comedy targets tend to be, you know, Gandhi or Thora Hird.'

If The Office had a message, he says, it's 'for God's sake don't end up here. Be true to yourself. You don't have to change the world, you don't even have to make a difference, but you can try to make as much difference as you possibly can, so at the end of the day you can say º ª you did the best you could with your life.'

He says he is happy with his half a dozen old friends and does not need any new ones (after he accepted his British comedy award he told any potential liggers: 'You don't know me so don't come up and congratulate me afterwards,' and more than half meant it).

In among all of his theories about comedy, one that he won't accept is that it must always come out of a kind of darkness, the tears of a clown. I ask him if there have been times in his life when he has felt down; has he ever not wanted to get out of bed in the mornings?

He looks genuinely appalled at the idea. 'No. No depression. Oh God, no. I mean,
when someone dies I cry. But I would never say: "What is the point of life?" I know there is no point to life. The point to life is having a laugh, getting on with everyone. Full stop.' He thinks about this a bit. 'I know how lucky I am. I don't allow stress. Being out of my comfort zone annoys me a bit; you know, if I have to drive a long way or something. Then I go: "Gervais. Your Dad used to hod-carry. Fucking grow up." That
always tends to work.' He giggles to himself at this admonishment, at the idea
of unhappiness, and, as ever, you cannot help but join in.

Ricky's new show Extras begins
airing in England July 21 on BBC2 and will begin airing here in the US sometime
later this year on HBO.

Broken
I recently had the opportunity to check out the short film entitled Broken.
To be honest most short films made by aspiring film-makers aren't that good.
For every Batman – Dead End there are dozens of poorly made/uninspired films. (Read the Batman Beyond fan made DVD.) I am happy to report that Broken fits squarely with
the "inspired" and "very good" short films camp.

In Broken, Bonnie Clayton awakens in a darkened apartment one stormy
night to discover that she's not alone. She's kidnapped by a group of mysterious
strangers and finds herself strapped to a wheelchair as one of these strangers
interrogates her. During the interrogation, Bonnie realizes that these strangers
might know something about her that's a mystery to even herself.

What I found most appealing about Broken was that the short seems as
if it's lifted directly from a longer movie. The art direction, special effects
and production are top notch. Visually, Broken is every bit as good
as most Hollywood releases and insanely better than most television shows or
made for television movies. To achieve this level visual quality in a short
film costing a mere $8,000 is an achievement onto itself.

If you're a movie going fan/visual effects nut like me, I cannot recommend Broken enough. Broken has gone and set the bar a bit higher for all other
fan made films out there. If you're planning on filming your own short movie
anytime in the future you'd be well advised to check out Broken to
see how to make a short movie right!

Battlestar Galactica
NBC must be in real ratings trouble if they're forced to broadcast three hours
of a show that only airs on one of their "sister" cable networks.
This upcoming Saturday (7/9), NBC will air a block of Battlestar Galactica beginning at 8:00 P.M. (EST). From their press release:

The sky's the limit when NBC launches a special three-hour primetime showcase
of SCI FI Channel's hit series "Battlestar Galactica" on Saturday,
July 9 (8-11 p.m. ET) -- less than one week before the second-season premiere
of "Battlestar" that will also include a marathon of the series' first-year
episodes.

The three "Battlestar Galactica" episodes to be featured on NBC are
"The Hand of God" (8-9 p.m. ET), "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part
I" (9-10 p.m. ET) and "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II" (10-11
p.m. ET).

The second season of "Battlestar Galactica" begins on SCI FI with
fresh episodes on Friday, July 15 (10-11 p.m. ET). In addition, a marathon of
the first season's 13 hour-long segments will run in order on Wednesday, July
6, starting at 10 a.m. (ET).

War of the Worlds (2005)
I went into the theater to see War of the Worlds with high expectations - probably too high. War of the Worlds is a good movie, but by no means a great one.

In War of the Worlds, often absent dad Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is watching his kids for the weekend while his ex-wife (Miranda Otto) takes a trip to visit her parents in Boston. During the weekend, strange storms strike all around the globe, a sort of precursor to an invasion of the Earth by a technologically superior alien species from (we assume) Mars. Witnessing the attack of one of these alien machine “tripods” on his home town, Ray and the kids flee the city and roam the countryside trying to find a way to Boston or, more importantly, anywhere where the Martian tripods aren’t.

Parts of this movie work well. The special effects and sound design are top-notch, while the acting is up to par on other director Steven Spielberg projects. War of the Worlds has some of the most memorable “moments” ever presented in a movie. Such as the Martian “instant cremation” heat ray, the initial attack on the city, the Martian bellow, the bodies in the water, the fiery train, the news crew scavenging for food in the downed airliner, the Martian weed covering the countryside, the roar of screams when the Martians attack the ferry…

On pure visual spectacle War of the Worlds is one of the best movies to come along in some time.

What I found most interesting in the movie was that the focus was squarely on Ray. We see what he sees. When Ray stands below a rise in a hill over which a gigantic battle is taking place between U.S. forces and the tripods we only see what happens on the lip of the rise, what Ray can see – not the actual battle in the valley below. This focus squarely on Ray brings the film down to a more personal level with the audience. We definitely get a sense that the entire world is suffering the fate of Ray and the eastern seaboard of the U.S., but since we only know what Ray does we cannot be sure.

Where the movie falls is in its story. I couldn’t quite understand why Ray, who shows little interest in his kids, would have them for the weekend in the first place if he were so absent. And Ray’s son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) seems hell-bent on joining up with the military and going off to fight the Martians, even if it means certain death.

I also thought the end of the movie was a bit of a letdown and not nearly as good as the 1953 movie of the same name.

War of the Worlds is a good movie, I just wished it was better. (8/10)

Narrator: By the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

Matthew Bennett
To the Matthew Bennet contacting me via Dangerous Universe, but whom forgot to
include his return e-mail address in the correspondence… Yes, I am the same Bert
Ehrmann who attended college at IPFW in the late 1990s. Contact
me again, but this time include your e-mail!

Starship Troopers
There seems to be a lot of action lately on the Starship Troopers front,
and all this action seems to be stemming from Mongoose
Publishing. There are a series of novels, a role playing game and a whole
bunch of miniatures now available based on Starship Troopers.

It looks as if most of this new stuff is based off an interesting blend of the
book Starship Troopers (1959) and television show Roughnecks: The
Starship Troopers Chronicles (1999). The armor used on the characters is
right out of the television show but there are also elements not used on the
television show, such as dogs, but present in the books.

Land of the DeadCheck out the Land of the Dead reel
by Spin, a digital effects company who
handled most (if not all) the digital effects in Land of the Dead. The
design reel contains a lot of the "neat" scenes in the movie. After watching
the reel,
I
was surprised as to how much of the effects in the were digital – Spin
handled/hid
them well. Oh, and that "Priest Zombie" still freaks me out.

Land of the Dead
Land of the Dead marks zombie maestro George Romero’s celebrated return to the genera he created nearly forty years ago. In Land of the Dead, the last vestiges of humanity have walled themselves off in fortified city enclaves surrounded by the zombie hoards roaming the countryside in search of human flesh. Enter the armored vehicle “The Dead Reckoning”, a sort of SUV from hell in which fighters from the city take out in order to gather supplies from the outside-infested countryside.

I had read an early version of the Land of the Dead, then entitled Dead Reckoning, last summer and enjoyed it very much. However, there were several problems I had with the characters and story. I am happy to report that these problems were ironed and the finished film is much better than the original version of the script.

In Land of the Dead, the crew of “The Dead Reckoning” is lead by Riley
(Simon Baker) who’s on the verge of retirement wanting to leave the city in a
vehicle he’s just purchased. Cholo (John Leguizamo) is Riley’s second in command
also wants to retire and live in the one occupied building in the city, Fiddler’s
Green. The city is controlled by Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) who decides who gets
an apartment in Fiddler’s Green and who doesn't. And Kaufman doesn't want
a rough character like Cholo anywhere near his high rise full of the rich and
wealthy.
What follows is Cholo stealing The Dead Reckoning threatening the city with destruction.
Kaufman, who has already plotted to keep Riley in the city, strikes a bargain
with him – stop Cholo and Kaufman will allow Riley to leave.

Except that no one has anticipated that the zombies outside lead by “Big Daddy” (Eugene Clark), have developed some sort of primitive intelligence. Going from the “mindless hoard” to having the ability to use weapons and to be able to see a way into the city no one had anticipated.

Land of the Dead is one of the most tightly edited movies I’ve ever
seen. The movie starts and doesn't let up until the end, some 90 minutes later.
In many respects, Land of the Dead reminds me a lot of The Thing from Another
World (1951), in that there are no wasted scenes or subplots. And the acting
is top notch. With not one of the major characters falling flat or even a minor
character loosing a step.

If there’s one problem that I have with the movie it’s that a lot of the usual
Romero political commentary we've come to expect from his zombie movies is missing
from Land of the Dead. My guess is that in order for the movie to be as tightly
edited and fast paced as it is, much of these commentaries were left on the cutting
room floor and will (hopefully) appear sometime on DVD. (9/10)

Justice League
Who knew that the current "Cadmus" storyline in the Justice League cartoon
running
on
Cartoon Network would be one of the most well written shows on television these
days? Justice League has always been good, but this season has been GREAT!

Global Frequency
I have seen the pilot episode – finally. I've wanted to see the Global
Frequency pilot since I first read about it last year and since the show
was never picked up
by a network, TheWb I believe, the pilot episode has appeared online by an
anonymous source. The Global Frequency comic book is one of the
best ones out there today.

The Global Frequency pilot is pretty good, taking the story
from the first issue of the comic book and modifying it a bit. Here, there
is a Russian
sleeper
agent from the Cold War who is a living psychic bomb with his powers enhanced
by a microchip implanted in his brain. But the chip's old
and is malfunctioning, slowly drawing him ever closer to an uncontrolled
explosion which will obliterate San Francisco. (The comic book dealt with
nuclear weapons rather than psychic bombs.)

Most of the episode works in that the
story comes
(pretty much)
directly from the comic. What I would have concerns about is that it looks
like the show would focus on two "stock" characters – an ex cop
who is more brawn than brain and a brainy, yet beautiful, professor who become
partners
at the end of the episode.

I always thought the strength of the comic was that
the characters switched around each episode (except for Miranda Zero) and that
there was uncertainty
in their
future – members of the Global Frequency could (and sometimes did) die. I can
see much of the drama in the comic book being lost in the translation to episodic
television.

I've read the series described as Mission Impossible meets The
X-Files and would have to agree with that.

Still, the pilot has a lot
of good things going for it. It's a shame that the Global Frequency series
won't be made. (8/10)

V for Vendetta
The New York Times has an interesting article on the movie V for Vendetta,
due in theaters this fall. From
the article (free registration required to
read the whole article):

IN a rare concession, authorities here agreed to close down all of Whitehall,
between Trafalgar and Parliament Squares, for a three-night film shoot earlier
this month. The scene on the third night was wild. Hundreds of crew members
and their equipment gathered in Parliament Square, flooded with light against
the backdrop of Big Ben and the London Eye. Tanks patrolled the streets.
More than 100 extras playing government commandos in army camouflage formed
a line in front of Parliament, while some 400 others playing rebels marched
en masse down Whitehall.

But the most radical
thing about the movie, written and produced by the brothers Andy and Larry
Wachowski and based on a 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore
and David Lloyd, is its climax. This is a story in which a dozy, passive
populace wakes up and rises against its government oppressors - and then,
in the name of freedom, blows up Parliament.

Doctor Who
The new actor set to play "The Doctor" next season on Doctor
Who, David Tennant,
was introduced with the season finale of the show last Saturday
on BBC. Tennant has big shoes to fill in
that (IMHO) Chris Eccleston was the best actor to handle the role "The Doctor"… Ever.

In an interesting twist of fate, there is still no plans on airing the series
here in the United States – definitely a loss for us Americans
in that this show is leaps and bounds better than most science fiction shows
currently airing on U.S. television.

FireflyFirefly returns to television – the series will rerun on Sci
Fi beginning next month. From
Zap2It:

The Sci Fi Channel has picked up the rights to Joss Whedon's "space Western"
-- including three episodes never aired on TV -- and will begin airing it Friday,
July 22. It will air at 7 p.m. ET, leading into the cable network's lineup of
original series -- the two "Stargate" shows and "Battlestar Galactica,"
which open their new seasons the previous week.

Crash
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Crash is "The most unlikely hit
of the summer":

Its success can be credited to a bold release plan, an emotional marketing
campaign
and an aggressive screening program. For "Crash" has been able to do
what few movies accomplish nowadays: It has attracted four very distinct demographic
groups -- college students, upscale adult audiences, the urban market and females.

The
result has been ticket sales of $36 million in just four weeks. The film could
gross as much as $50 million -- a number that might exceed the final domestic
grosses of the expected summer hits it opened against: 20th Century Fox's "Kingdom
of Heaven" and Warner Bros. Pictures' "House of Wax."
Read
the whole story here. Read my review of Crash here.

Found a couple more movies out there from the Fan Base. Mostly from theforce.net, but eh, what the heck. View at your discretion, cause some of them are not all that great. Make sure you have QUICKTIME!!

Ah yes, the lovely 3 day weekend of Memorial Day has come and gone, and my lady and I perchanced fate (once more) and ventured out in search of moviedom. And we stumbled upon a 10 AM showing of Star Wars Episode 3.

Rather than risking the possible mob of Jedi wanna be's running about, we arrived promptly at 925 and took our seats at the back of the theater (stadium style seating is always a plus!)

Our storyline starts out with a all out star ship slug fest over the planet of Coruscant, with our good supreme Chancellor Palpatine captured by the forces of General Grevious. Im sure if Bert saw the flick, he would agree with Kristin and I of it being a bit reminiscence of the current Battlestar TV series. Of course, our two loveable Jedi Knight Hero's gotta show up and save the day.. And promptly hack the place apart to boot! (I wont spoil it for ya, but Anakin gets a glimpse of the dark side in the rescue)

The scene fades to find Anakin and Padme discovering that Padme is pregnant, and that they will have to figure out what all they are gonna do with everyone else finding out about it. All the while, civil distrust runs amok on several Republic planets with the Separatist Droid armies attacking. This forces the Jedi Council to deploy its Jedi to help fight the contested planets, and thereby allowing Chancellor Palpatine to gain further control over the Republic.

As the movie plays out, Palpatine further and further tempts Anakin with the dark side of the Force, thereby leading him down a path of destruction. Anakin does this willingly, only because he believes it is the only way to keep Padme with him for the rest of his life. Little does he know.. heh..

I think you can pretty much figure out the end? If not, please rent Episode 1 and 2 from your local video store, or just order Netflix like the rest of us lazy jokers.

As a review of this movie, several things kinda went askew with this {which of course Kristin blames on me reading the Book prior to seeing the movie. :) }

1.This movie needs more of the WOOK! I cant be more demanding on this part. There were in the movie for like a total of 10 minutes!! This is close to a Two and a half hour movie!! They barely got to fight!!

2.Space battles were too short. Rather than focusing on some kick ass space melee's going on between the capital ships, Lucas chose to make us watch R2D2 take out two SUPER BATTLE DROIDS with an oil slick.

3.What happened to the cool Droid voices?? Instead of the real deep metallic sounding voices, Lucas decided to hire 2 retired chipmunks to do the voices for the droids. Nice...

4.Acting a bit reserved??Not only once, but several times did Kristin and I watch Samuel L. Jackson hold back his former acting persona of SHAFT! as Mace Windu. I know he is supposed to be a reserved Jedi Master, and not show emotions and what not, but COME ON. This is SAMUEL L. JACKSON PEOPLE!! The Cartoon version of Mace Windu did more ass kicking and mouthin off than the movie version! Lucas CLEARLY held him back from giving Mace Windu the full representation he deserved!

5.Obi-Wan is strong with the Force As proved in the final installment, Obi-Wan brings it by taking out several dozen droids, Clone Troopers, and a few others I wont disclose. If you go see the movie, I dont think youll be disappointed with his role in things.

And Finally: 6.Anakin needs some darker days. Granted we only have Two and a half hours to see him go from Good to Evil, but I still think his character focus should have had him show off a bit more of is darker side. Its not till the last 20 minutes of the flick that I feel he truly became evil.

As far as everything else? Good to go. Worth a Matinee viewing, with a wide arrangements of CGI Special effects and lightsaber duels. Yoda gets to throw down, once again, and Palpatine gets turned into a 2 eyed slug. (Oops!) Just kidding...

Battlestar GalacticaGateWorld has details on the first five episodes of season two of Battlestar Galactica, as well as a few photos from the upcoming series. I can't wait! Swipe your mouse
below to read descriptions for the first two episodes.

SCATTERED - Chaos is rampant as paramedics try to save
Commander Adama's life, and the Galactica is separated from the fleet. Suspicion
is cast on even the closest of allies. Part 1 of 2.

VALLEY OF DARKNESS - Cylon Centurions board the Galactica and wreak havoc, and
Lee leads a team of Marines to try and stop them. Part 2 of 2.

The Night Stalker
Dread Central doesn't like the upcoming The Night Stalker television
series airing on ABC this fall. From
Dread Central:

I guess in a weird way it’s all come full circle. "X-Files"
creator Chris Carter has said that "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" was
one of the inspirations for his show, and the guy behind the new "Night Stalker"
is Frank Spotnitz, who served as writer and producer on "The X-Files",
and as has now become apparent, he’s taken "Kolchak: The Night Stalker"
and turned it into a blatant clone of "The X-Files". I wish I could
get paid millions of dollars for doing stuff that unimaginative.

Now to be fair, there’s always a chance "The Night Stalker" will
turn out to be a good series even if does stray way too far from its source material
and way too close to a certain other program that has already seen countless copies
come and go.

War of the Worlds
In the new commercials for the upcoming remake War of the Worlds there's
a quick cut (blink and you'll miss) of the Martian tripod war machines. The tripods
look like a cross between the classic text version and the 1950's George Pal version.

DVDs
Out on DVD now is one of the oddest (and best) series to come out of Nickelodeon:
season one of The
Adventures of Pete and Pete. Out on DVD August, 16 is the complete series
of Undeclared.
Covered many times here at Dangerous Universe.

Movie trailers
Check out three new movie trailers released today including, the "more
amazing everytime I watch" War
of the Worlds, the "looks less interesting everytime I see more
of " Fantastic
Four and Stealth,
a movie that could be good but probably won't.

"FATHOM" -- Ever wonder what life would be like if a new form of
sea
life began to appear in locales all over the earth? In this expansive drama,
those who are about to find out include some naval officers in the South Antarctic
Sea, a family in San Diego, scientists from the Oceanographic Institute in Monterey,
and fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico. The seemingly innocent creatures they find
are beautiful and kids may even want to play with them -- but is there something
more to them? One thing's for sure - they're full of surprises as viewers can
embark on this unfathomable journey to discover what might be lurking in the
sea.

Fathom sounds interesting, while at the same time I can see a million ways
how the show will disappoint. (And Fathom really should send a note
of thanks
to Lost since there's no way in the world a show like this could have
ever gotten
a green light without Lost having been a huge hit.)

SyrianaThe New York
Times has an interesting article on the glut of CIA/FBI movies due
out over the next few years, and more specifically the movie Syriana written
and directed by Stephen Gaghan the writer of Traffic. From
The New York Times:

Just as "Traffic" interwove a wide range of characters, from top government
officials to low-level users in the United States and Mexico, "Syriana" juxtaposes
diverse characters and perspectives. "There are a lot of people who are
a bit on a proscenium, and they have really strong points of view, and their
points of view are valid," he said. "All of them. That's what blew
me away. They're diametrically opposed, and both accurate."

The conclusion to be drawn from his script - which is fictional but, he says,
steeped in fact - is not exactly sanguine. "A friend of mine read it and
said, 'Wow, I feel like I'm watching a husband and wife doing the dishes in the
shadow of Mount Vesuvius,' " Mr. Gaghan said. He continued: "There's
this rumbling, and they're sitting there looking out the window, and one of them's
saying, 'You know, that's really loud, I wonder if Vesuvius is going to go off.'
And the husband says, 'Oh no, honey, it's a thunderstorm, it always rains this
time in the afternoon,' and they just go back to doing dishes."

Arrested Development
Could it be true? Could Arrested Development be renewed for TWO years? I pray this to be true! From E!:

Hallelujah! Arrested Development fans, brace yourselves. I have some good
news and--well, you might want to sit down for this--some mind-blowing, earth-shattering,
out-of-this-world, fantastic news.

Earlier this week, a friend here at E! interviewed Jason Bateman at a charity
event with his good friend Ben Stiller. When asked the status of Arrested Development,
he lit up like a banana stand: "Actually, great. Supergreat. There is a heartbeat.
There is no flatline. And there may be twins. I'm going to let Kristin figure
out what that means. I can't comment any further, but there will be an announcement
next week."

Point Blank
I've always been interested in seeing the movie Point Blank (1967) starring
Lee Marvin (The Dirty Dozen, The Big Red One) and directed by
John Boorman (Deliverance, Hope and Glory) but up until now
the movie hasn't been readily available. But I need not wait much longer, on
July, 5 Point Blank will (finally) be released on DVD.

From Amazon.com:Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare
of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend,
who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist,
Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he
survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream?

Into the West
In early June, TNT premier the new series Into
the West,
a "six
week television event." The series, executive produced by Steven Spielberg,
is a "dramatic tale of the adventurous exploration of the American wilderness,
the clash of two cultures, the rush to riches in a new land and the building
of
a new civilization." Much like another Spielberg series, in this case Taken, Into the West takes place over an (about) sixty years timeframe.
(And I always thought this was a problem with Taken, that this
long timescale and new characters each week alienated the audience from the
story.)

Is it possible that Into the West could be as good as Deadwood?
(Odds of this happening – 99 to 1.)

Superman
The official costume for the upcoming Superman Returns movie was released
to
the Internet
last Friday. Although I have nothing against the costume, my friend Tim felt
that the costume was too much a departure from the traditional Superman design. So
he took it upon himself to Photoshop the image with a more traditional looking
costume design. I must admit that I prefer his design over the one being used
in
the
movie.

(I think the actor portraying Clark Kent/Superman looks too young for the role.
Although he'd be perfect as Superboy, he doesn't look enough like a SuperMAN for me. But that's another matter…)

Arrested Development
If last night's episode (4/17) of Arrested Development really was the
last episode to air (the series hasn't been picked up yet for season three),
then the creators of the show really went out on top. The episode was definitely
the best episode of the year and quite possibly the best ever episode of the
series.

Veronica Mars
It's official, there will be a second season of Veronica Mars! From
Yahoo:

There's no mystery about it: UPN has given a vote of confidence to its buzzworthy
but ratings-challenged freshman drama "Veronica Mars" by handing the Warner Bros.
TV series an early renewal for a second season.

Battlestar Galactica
Last Friday (4/1) saw the final episode of the first season of Battlestar
Galactica. But fret not, season two of the series beings in July with ten
brand new episodes slated for airing then. Series creator Ron Moore confirmed
in a Podcast that the first episode of the second season starts off moments after
the shocking events of the previous episode.

Lost
In an apparent attempt to alienate loyal viewers and confuse new ones as to the
ongoing story, ABC has decided to once again pull new episodes of Lost from their schedule for three upcoming weeks. March '05 featured two new episodes
of Lost while April '05 will feature just one new episode. (Not including
the "Lost Special Edition Episode" airing later this month which is
more of a "clip show" designed to bring new viewers up to speed on Lost and tick off already loyal ones just wanting more Lost.)

For those paying attention, for three weeks in March ABC aired repeats of Lost while two weeks in April will also be (I am assuming) repeats.

C'mon ABC – Lost is a show where people are forced to remember
minute details from week to week on each episode's storyline. And when new episodes
of Lost air (nearly) months apart, people will forget what's going on
and loose interest in the show. ABC seems to be following the Fox formula of how
best to kill a great show – here and here.

The Office
The American version of The Office doesn't seem to be doing that great. From BBC:

The second episode of the show, broadcast on NBC, attracted 5.9 million viewers
on Tuesday. Its debut was seen by 11.2 million on Thursday 24 March.

The second episode came fourth in its 2130 slot, beaten by Fox medical drama House
attracting 18 million viewers in first place. Starring British actor Hugh Laurie,
House follows American Idol in the schedules.

Eccleston out as Doctor Who
File this under "Ugh", Eccleston currently plays the best incarnation
of Doctor Who in many, many years. From
BBC:
Actor Christopher Eccleston has quit as Doctor Who after just one episode of
the new series has been screened, the BBC has confirmed.

"The audience's response for the new Doctor Who has been incredible and
I am really proud to be part of it and I hope viewers continue to enjoy the
series," he said in a statement issued through the BBC.

(A BBC spokesman) said that although talks to make David
Tennant the 10th Doctor were taking place, other names may be put forward.

Bill Nighy was also considered for the Eccleston role, while Richard E Grant
starred in a BBC web drama version of Doctor Who.

Dinner for FiveDeadwood creator David Milch and show star Tim Olyphant (Dreamcatcher)
will be guests on Jon Favreau's show Dinner for Five this Friday (4/1)
at 10:00 P.M. (EST) on IFC. Learn
more here.

Returning shows
Both Lost and Veronica Mars return this week with new episodes.
(Finally.) The new Veronica Mars premieres tonight (3/29) while Lost premiers tomorrow night (3/30). From
UPN on Veronica Mars:

"Betty and Veronica"
Tuesday, March 29, 9PM ET/PT
Following an emotional reunion with her mother, Veronica is hired to track down
Neptune High's beloved mascot, Polly the Parrot, which was apparently kidnapped
by a rival school on the eve of a big basketball game.

Meanwhile, with her suspicions about the Kane family rekindled, Veronica attempts
to gain access to her father's original interrogation tapes. Later, Veronica's
relationship with Deputy Leo heats up, as does Meg's relationship with Duncan.

Wednesday, March 30, 8/7c
"Deus Ex Machina"
Boone becomes concerned when Locke suffers physical problems while they try
to find a way into the mysterious hatch. Meanwhile, Jack is reluctant to help
when Sawyer starts to experience excruciating headaches, and Michael and Jin
struggle to communicate while working together on the raft.

Star Wars: Clone Wars
I don't know what's worse – that I watched the latest installment of Star
Wars: Clone Wars on Cartoon Network or that I thought the story was more satisfying than the last two Star Wars movies?

Doctor Who
Luck Brit gits, Doctor Who begins airing in Great Britain this weekend
with no immediate plans for the series airing across the pond here in the U.S.
I am officially jealous. Read my review of the
first episode of the series here.

The Office
I thought that the first episode of the American version of The Office was good but not great. If the original British version was an A+ then the remake
was a solid B. Much like the American version of Coupling, I felt as
if the jokes were told waaaay too fast. It was almost as if the people doing
the remake wanted to fit in everything that happened in the original half hour
into the American 20 minute version. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There was
no pause for laughs. The timing was very bad.

I did think they did a good job of having the "awkward pauses" that
made the original so good. Especially in the end.

I've heard that the first episode isn't too good but the rest, which are original
scripts and not remakes, are good.

Yes indeed. Ole Lucas has pulled out the stops, and got an updated main page for the Star Wars website, in honor of the release of Episode III. Lotsa cool pics and downloadables if you like. Check em out!

I could only wish for one!! With the media capabilities of a DVD Player, an IPod (well close enough) and the near-graphical prowess of a Playstation 2, the PlayStation Portable looks to be breaking a few holiday records this year. Check it out!

Fever Pitch
So there is this new movie out starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon. It's a romantic comedy about a huge Redsox fan and a girl that likes him despite him liking baseball and being Jimmy Fallon.
There are a couple of reasons I don't like this idea.

It's already been made. It was a British romantic comedy called Fever Pitch back in '97. It was about a guy that really loved Arsenal (a British soccer team for you ignorant types) and had a girl that liked him despite him liking soccer and being Colin Firth (oh, wait... girls actually like him).

It's a Nick Hornby adaptation. Nick Hornby is the brilliant author that brought us High Fidelity, How to Be Good and About a Boy. Now, admittedly About a Boy is a bit of a chick flick, it's good and the book is better.

It stars Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore.

I don't know who should be more upset: Hornby fans, British football fans, Redsox fans for cinema fans in general. I'll explain: Hornby is one of my favorite authors. He's a genius and writes a fantastic book that almost always translates well to film. Football fans have to be upset that "soccer" isn't good enough of a sport to use. Redsox fans have to be very upset because Fallon is the worst representative of a Boston fan ever. In the words of a sports journalist from Boston, Bill Simmons, "50 Cent would be more convincing." Finally, fans of cinema: not only is a movie being remade that doesn't need remade, it's being remade poorly. I've never even seen the first one or read the book and I'm pissed.

Joe Devito
Illustrator Joe Devito has some very cool paintings and illustrations up over
at his web site, as well as some step-by-step instruction material on how he paints. Check it out, your eyes will thank you.

Extras
The first bits of inforamtion on Gervais and Merchant's (The Office)
next show – Extras. From Zap2It:

Set in an actors' green room, Gervais plays Andy Millman, a wannabe star who's
having a difficult enough time getting speaking parts. Stephen Merchant, who co-created
"The Office" with Gervais, will play Millman's agent.

"It will be a very different piece from 'The Office,'" BBC 2 Controller
Roly Keating tells the Independent newspaper. "It will have a very different
dynamic. It's a closed set, so there's an element of mystery around it. The whole
set-up means it will move on from 'The Office,' which was filmed as a mock documentary.
This is done differently in terms of being a more scripted piece."

War of the Worlds
The extremely cool looking War of the Worlds second teaser trailer has been released, you can see
it for yourself here. I am at a loss of words as to describe how cool it looks.
Keep watch for a "blink and you'll miss it" glimpse of a Martian war
machine tipping a boat about 3/4ths the way through the trailer.

Sin City
It's official, the upcoming Sin City movie looks like the coolest movie
to come along in some time. Honestly, the movie looks like the perfect comic book
adaptation. (Is it too much to ask that the movie turn out as good as the trailer
looks?) Check
out the full trailer for the movie here.

Lost
Details on the DVD for the television show Lost due out in stores this
September. From Dark
Horizons:

Each of the episodes will be presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen along
with English Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks. Extras will include the never-before-seen,
extended uncut version of the original pilot, exclusive, in-depth behind-the-scenes
looks at the making of the show, backstage with Drive Shaft all-access pass
behind the music, the art of Matthew Fox featurette; 'Before They Were Lost'
original casting tapes, a blooper reel, rare deleted scenes and multiple filmmaker
audio commentaries. Retails around $60.

LostLost show creator J.J. Abrams confirms that one of the characters of
the series will be killed off this season. From
Zap2It:

"I wasn't really surprised that the death of this character was as
hard in real life as it was on the show," Abrams said.

Showrunner Carlton Cuse added, "We felt that on a story level, we needed
to retain the life-and-death stakes," noting, somewhat humorously, that
with a bursting-at-the-seams cast of series regulars, ABC wouldn't have minded
some additional casualties during the season.

The OfficeThe American version of the Brit hit The
Office is set to premiere Thursday, March 24 at 9:30 P.M. (EST). However,
this episode will premiere online over at Myspace.com on Wednesday, March 16 at 8:00 P.M. (EST). (I'm guessing that the episode will
be in crappy streaming Windows Media format and that you'll have to sign up
for a Myspace.com account to watch the episode.)

NBC describes the episode as:

WELCOME TO DUNDER MIFFLIN PAPER SUPPLY COMPANY - When a documentary crew
comes to the offices of Dunder Mifflin to observe the employees and learn about
modern management, manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell) tries to paint a happy
picture of his domain, but his jokes keep falling flat. Then, worse, his supervisor
from the corporate office tells him that his branch may be downsized. Making
a characteristically bad leadership decision, Michael decides not to tell his
staff, but the information quickly leaks. Meanwhile sales rep Jim (John Krasinski)
spars with his irritating nemesis Dwight (Rainn Wilson), and flirts with office
receptionist Pam (Jenna Fischer), until they are all forced to consider what
their options are if there is downsizing. B.J. Novak also stars.

Movie Trailers
Two interesting trailers have been released in the last few days, Will Farrell
plays psycho nut-job soccer coach in Kicking
and Screaming and Layer
Cake introduces us to the Brit criminal underworld.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Check out the two Internet only trailers released a few weeks back and now available
on the Apple trailer site here and here for the upcoming movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Doctor Who
I've seen the first episode of the revival of BBC's Doctor Who. (I won't
divulge who showed it to me.) The show is good, very good. Christopher Eccleston
(28 Days Later) as the new Doctor is good. He plays the role with a sort
of comedic-swagger only an Englishman could pull off, spouting lines like,

Doctor, "I'm the Doctor by the way what's your name?"
Rose, "Rose."
Doctor, "Nice to meet you Rose. Run for your life."

Billie Piper as the Doctor's companion Rose Tyler and is also good, holding her
own against Eccleston playing the character as a normal everyday person swept
up in the action.

The only few hickups were with some of the visual effects. Still, the effects
used in this new version of Doctor Who are light years better than the
ones used in the original series.

It is absolutely a crime that no-one's picked up this show for airing in the U.S.
The Sci Fi Channel, are you listening? Dump Stargate and PICK UP DOCTOR
WHO! (9/10)

Deadwood
Premiering this Sunday (3/6) on HBO is season two of the acclaimed
series Deadwood. The tagline for this season seems to be "fortune
comes with a price." From the official
site:

The spring of 1877 brings major changes to the teeming outlaw camp of Deadwood,
as civilization makes its way to town. New arrivals will usher in an era of
power struggles with the camp founders-and power struggles in Deadwood have
a way of turning violent…

Dangerous Universe has been covering Deadwood since January of '04, and has
amassed quite a backlog
of material. I, for one, can't wait for Sunday.

Movie Trailers
View trailers for upcoming Lords
of Dogtown and the remake of Bad
News Bears. I think Bad News Bears looks interesting, but after
seeing the Lords of Dogtown trailer I have absolutely no desire to see
that movie. The acting looks to be awful. And I had high hopes for Lords of
Dogtown after seeing the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary last year.

The Manchurian Candidate
This news piece sounds more than a little like the science behind the movie The
Manchurian Candidate. From
Yahoo:

A procedure that involves drilling two holes into a person's skull and then
implanting electrodes in the brain has shown promise in treating individuals who
are severely depressed and resistant to other types of treatment.

Four of six patients who received this deep brain stimulation showed sustained
improvement six months after the procedure took place, scientists report in the
March 3 issue of Neuron.

I suppose next they'll be implanting "bravery" or "courage under"
fire into people's skulls. Life does imitate art.

Michael Mann
And the next movie for Collateral director Michael Mann is…

(Peter) Berg is also working on a film with fellow Director Michael Mann,
director of "Collateral", which Berg had a small acting role in - "The
thing with Michael Mann is called The Kingdom, about an American FBI agent who
goes to Saudi Arabia to investigate a bombing".

Boone and his "sister"… I don't think they will go anytime soon.
Locke needs a protegee, and Boone appears to be it. Boone is the only connection
the audience has with Locke, the only way we have of getting a glimpse into Locke's
mind that's denied to the other characters. Boone's sister also might be safe,
however annoying. She is chaos. Like Sawyer, she is motivated by her own totally
selfish desire, but unlike Sawyer, who at least knows what he wants in any situation
(whatever he thinks will benefit him) and is aware of the possible consequences
(even if he doesn't care), Boone's "sister" has no idea why she acts
the way she does, or that she seems to cause trouble everywhere she goes. This
does not necessarily mean she'll make it to season two, but in fiction, such characters
rarely "get what is coming to them." Ideally, she would be "taught
a lesson," but learning something, especially about your character, requires
a little self-reflection, which Boone's sister lacks (Compare this with Sawyer,
who seems to realize that he's thrown his lot in with the scumbags of the world,
but has convinced himself over time that it's what he needs to do to survive).
Her death would not have the resonance the show would need to really scare someone,
nor would it be satisfying to the audience. She is much more useful to the show's
creators alive, where she can stir up trouble among the survivors.

Even more Lost
Let's face it, Lost is a show where anything can and sometimes
does happen. It would not surprise me in the least if one of the major characters
(like Jack or Kate) doesn't make it to the second season. For instance –
on The Sopranos, one of the major characters was unexpectedly killed
off in about the same amount of episodes as season one of Lost.

I would respect the creators of Lost even more than I already do (which would
be hard) if they'd take the chance of killing off a highly popular character of
the show. (Rumor has it that Jack and pregnant Claire weren't originally supposed
to be regulars on the show with Jack being killed off in the pilot (first) episode
and Claire soon after.)

Lost... some more
I agree with the previous post, and would like to add.
Walt could go, showing how horrific this island is to leave the kid without any parents (and a broken relationship with his father that he'll be unable to resolve (without the help of the mysterious forces on the island)).
Boone or his whiny sister could go and no one would miss them.
That's about all I have to add.

Lost
Who will be the first main character to die on Lost? Whomever it is better
pray that the rains stay away. (When it rains it means that someone's going to
die on Lost.) From Michael
Summers:

Hurley won't die. Hurley is what they call "5th Business." It's a theater term
that means he's the character that doesn't change, so we can measure the growth/changes
of the other characters around him. In the Star Wars movies, C-3PO was
5th business. In Lord of the Rings (LOTR), Gimli and the two other hobbits
were 5th business. Not every movie or story has a 5th business character, but
a lot do, once you start looking.

Now Charlie… Charlie might die one of these days. Why? Because, it would
show the audience the true horror of the castaway's predicament. Charlie is the
decent guy who tries to do the right thing, despite his flaws. He tries to change,
but in the end, his innate goodness can't overcome the malevolent forces on the
island. He's the innocent. Clare, I guess, is the true innocent, but she's the
madonna figure. Perhaps more importantly, however, there is NO WAY they're going
to kill a pretty girl with a baby.

Jack is the hero. Sawyer is the anti-Jack, but he's not really the anti-hero,
or not the true anti-hero of the story. The real anti-hero of the show is Locke.
He's essential to the story, essential to the survivors, but we have no idea where
his true loyalties lie, or what his agenda is. (In the first Star Wars,
Han Solo was the anti-hero. In The Empire Strikes Back… well, I don't
know who it was exactly in The Empire Strikes Back, but I could argue
that it's Yoda. In Return of the Jedi, it was Darth Vader).

Sayid is the classic sidekick. He's not quite Jack's loyal servant, like Sam in LOTR. He's a little like R2 in Star Wars — highly competent,
seems to follow his own agenda and initiative sometimes, but you have no doubt
that he's with the good guys. Unlike Jack, he does not have to be "the leader,"
and freed from that responsibility, he just gets done what needs to get done.

Battlestar Galactica
Sci Fi Channel is reporting that season two of Battlestar Galactica will begin airing this summer a mere few months after the end of season one.
Is this good or bad for the show? Will people become burned out on Battlestar
Galactica if there isn't enough of a lag time between seasons? Remember
that ABC killed their once hugely popular show Who Wants to be a Millionaire by airing it almost every night. If Sci Fi aires too much Battlestar,
will the show suffer the same fate? From Sci
Fi Channel:

SCI FI Channel announced that the second season of its hit original series
Battlestar Galactica will premiere this summer, with 20 new episodes.

McFarlane's Military
Todd McFarlane does military toys. The figures, due out in May, include; U.S.
Army Ranger, Navy Seal, Marine Corps Recon Sniper, Marine Corps Recon, Army Desert
Infantry, and Air Force Special Operations Command, CCT. Learn
more here.

Hunter S. Thompson R.I.P.
Hunter S. Thompson, famed journalist who's words launched a million drug trips,
is dead by his own hand. From The
New York Times:

Hunter S. Thompson, the maverick journalist and author whose savage chronicling
of the underbelly of American life and politics embodied a new kind of nonfiction
writing he called "gonzo journalism," died yesterday in Colorado. Tricia
Louthis, of the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office, said Mr. Thompson had died of
a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., yesterday afternoon.
He was 65.

Mr. Thompson, a magazine and newspaper writer who also wrote almost a dozen books,
was perhaps best known for his book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,"
which became a Hollywood movie in 1998. But he was better known for his hard-driving
lifestyle and acerbic eye for truth which he used in the style of first-person
reporting that came to be known as "gonzo" in the 1960's, where the
usually-anonymous reporter becomes a central character in the story, a conduit
of subjectivity.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an excellent movie and a better
book. Hunter S. Thompson will be missed.

Starship Troopers
I'm not sure if this is a comp. poster never produced for the movie Starship
Troopers or one that I've just never seen. (And trust me, I think I've seen
them all and own quite a few!)

On Tuesday, Feb. 22, Alyson Hannigan, who spent the final two of "Buffy
the Vampire Slayer's" seven seasons on UPN, returns to the network in the
first of two episodes of UPN's teen-mystery series "Veronica Mars."

Hannigan plays Trina Echolls, half-sister of Logan (Jason Dohring), a high-school
nemesis of sleuth Veronica (Kristen Bell). Of late, Logan and Veronica have
struck up a truce, as she helps him answer questions he has about the supposed
suicide of his mother, Lynn Echolls (Lisa Rinna), wife of movie star Aaron Echolls
(Harry Hamlin, Rinna's real-life spouse).

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The trailer for the upcoming movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has
been released. Unfortunately (for now) it's being hosted on Amazon.com and is
only available in a Flash version. (Which sputters and stops on slower connections.)
Ugh. Why can't all trailers be released in Quicktime?

I genuinely liked the trailer and found several parts of it extremely funny. I
did catch myself thinking, "That's not how it was like in the television
series." But I had to remind myself that this is another format for the story
and that I should retain an open mind.

Arrested Development
So, it's a good thing that Fox is reducing the order of Arrested Development this
season to 18 from 22 episodes, pulling it from the May sweeps and not showing
a new one for the next three weeks? From the San
Francisco Chronicle:

How screwed up is the TV business? Here's the logic behind the Fox decision:
Bad is not bad. Bad is good. Because good could have turned out bad, and that
would have been really bad.

Translation: Cutting back is a business decision that doesn't reflect on the show's
creativity. We know you want to be on in May, but if the numbers aren't good against
super-stiff sweeps competition, the chances of getting picked up for a third season
drop exponentially.

Part of this counterintuitive TV logic is that May is not only a sweeps month,
it's also when the network "upfronts" happen in New York. You don't
want to be bleeding viewers when the network is deciding on its fall schedule,
which it presents to advertisers and press in May. There have been more than a
few legendarily last-second flip-flops in scheduling that have embarrassed producers
(and networks). It's a scary, unsure time. And if you're a precious, media-darling
series like "Arrested Development" that has all the good ink and even
the good hardware (an Emmy, a Golden Globe for Jason Bateman), but not much of
an audience, you don't want to stick your neck out.

So, as illogical as it may sound, Fox is trying to protect the series. At least
that's the now compromising position it has taken. The network, reeling from an
overdose of failed reality series, is starting to turn things around with scripted
midseason shows ("House," "24") and is right this minute choosing
pilots for next fall. One of those series, according to a source at Fox, is being
picked up solely because it's a good fit with "Arrested Development."

Deadwood
There's a profile of Deadwood writer/creator David Milch in this weeks issue
of The New Yorker, February 14 & 21. In it, Milch reveals that the show he
initially pitched to HBO was "about the lives of cops in ancient Rome during
Nero's reign, before a system of justice had been codified." But since
HBO already had a show about Rome in production, learn
more here, Milch decided to do a Western instead and the rest is television
history.

Matt's e-mail went: bert what country are you from?how much do you know of new zealand history?,the
people of new zealand did not settle land claims,by killing the maori population,land
was confiscated by the british government for settlement that led to around
12 years of warfare with british government troops, i suggest a you read james
belich the nz land wars and michael king's history of new zealand.

bert what country are you from? – From a country that takes pride in punctuation.

how much do you know of new zealand history? – Everything I know about New Zealand I learned from watching Russell
Crowe.

the people of new zealand did not settle land claims,by
killing the maori population – Okay. If you say so.

land was confiscated by the british government for
settlement that led to around 12 years of warfare with british government troops, – Ummm, okay. So the British whom eventually became "the people of
New Zealand" killed the native populations. Are you arguing semantics here,
or was the "warfare" you describe a bloodless one?

i suggest a you read james belich the nz land wars
and michael king's history of new zealand. – And I suggest
you read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. It's excellent. Let's make
a deal; if you read The Forever War I'll read Mike King's book. Deal?

But seriously folks, if you're coming to Dangerous Universe for facts on New
Zealand, you're coming to the wrong place. Never once have I said that I am an
expert on New Zealand. An expert on Arrested Development yes. New Zealand
no.

Lost
So I was giving in to temptation and checking out what happened on last night's episode of Lost (I'm told someone died, and dammit, but I have to know who) when I found out the DVDs will be released in September. This is good news for my enjoyment and bad news for my wallet. September is a bad month for me considering tuition, books, and rent kick in in August.

Battlestar Galactica
It's official, there's going to be a second season of Battlestar Galactica. From Sci Fi Wire:

SCI FI Channel has ordered a second season of its hit series Battlestar Galactica…

For the show's second season, creator and executive producer Ronald D. Moore previously
told SCI FI Wire that he has already been working on as many as six new scripts
to resolve the multiple cliffhangers that will end season one. Moore added that
he wants to delve deeper into the show's religious themes and open up the Cylon
world a bit more in the coming season.

Lost
New Lost returns to ABC tonight after several weeks of repeats. From ABC:

After the missing Claire returns with no recollection of what has happened
since before the doomed flight of Oceanic 815, Jack and Locke formulate a plan
of defense against her kidnapper, the mysterious Ethan, who threatens to kill
off the other survivors unless Claire is returned to him.

Whilst snooping around the web this morning, i spotted some new photos from the up and coming sequel to Underworld, starring Kate Beckinsale and Scott Speedman.

' "Underworld: Evolution" continues the saga of war between the aristocratic Death Dealers and the barbaric Lycans (werewolves). The film traces the beginnings of the ancient feud between the two tribes as Selene (Kate Beckinsale), the beautiful vampire heroine, and Michael (Scott Speedman), the lycan hybrid, try to unlock the secrets of their bloodlines. The fast-paced, modern-day tale of deadly action, ruthless intrigue and forbidden love takes them into the battle to end all wars as the immortals must finally face their retribution.'

Veronica Mars
New Veronica Mars returns to UPN tonight after a few weeks of rerun hell. From UPN:

After being hired by hip-hop heavyweight Percy "Bone" Hamilton
(guest star Anthony Anderson) to find his kidnapped daughter, Veronica and Keith
look to the music mogul's long list of enemies, family members and the girl's
Neptune High social circle for clues on her whereabouts.

EyeTV
I recently upgraded my home EyeTV system from the original EyeTV USB to the
EyeTV 200. The old EyeTV captured video at 320x240 in MPEG1 format, the new
one captures it at a larger 720x480 in MPEG2 format. This new format also captures
and saves the closed captioning and can save the video in a multitude of different
aspect ratios. Check out the below image for an example of grabs of the two
EyeTV formats. The image on the left is from the original EyeTV at 200% while
the image on the right is from the new EyeTV at 100%. There's a lot more detail
in the new one, just look at how the building on the right disappears on the
old version and how the sky is blue in the new version.

But there's a drawback even with this quality. First off, recording 45 minutes
on old EyeTV takes up around 450 MB of disk space while the new takes up over
1.3 GB. (Which translates to roughly 10 MB per minute of recording on the old
and around 29 MB on the new.) And whereas I used to be able to burn over seven
hours of content saved on the old EyeTV to DVD for viewing, I can only fit two
of the new.

Still, the new EyeTV 200 is loads better than the old and I am very happy for
my purchase.

The UnitSpartan the television series? Who could ask for more? From Zap2It:
"The Unit," which comes from writer-director David Mamet and "The
Shield" creator Shawn Ryan. The show, about the lives of special forces soldiers
and their families, is based on Eric Haney's 2002 book "Inside Delta Force."

Mamet ("Glengarry Glen Ross," "State and Main") wrote the
pilot script and will executive produce with Ryan, the showbiz trades report.
The pilot order comes after CBS gave the show a preliminary okay last fall.

Star Trek
It's all over. Battered and ignored step-child of the Star Trek family Enterprise has (finally) been canceled – the first Star Trek series
to be canceled in over thirty years. (I can't say I ever cared too much for Enterprise and only caught a few episodes. I haven't watched much Star
Trek since Deep Space Nine in the late 1990's.) From the official Star
Trek site:

UPN and Paramount Network Television have jointly announced that this will
be the final season of Star Trek: Enterprise on UPN. [Production will continue
until the end of this season, which will finish shooting in March.] The series
finale will air on Friday, May 13, 2005.

"Star Trek has been an important part of UPN's history, and Enterprise
has carried on the tradition of its predecessors with great distinction,"
said Dawn Ostroff, President, Entertainment, UPN. "We'd like to thank Rick
Berman, Brannon Braga and an incredibly talented cast for creating an engaging,
new dimension to the Star Trek universe on UPN, and we look forward to working
with them, and our partners at Paramount Network Television, on a send-off that
salutes its contributions to The Network and satisfies its loyal viewers."

War of the Worlds
Look for a commercial for the upcoming remake movie War of the Worlds to air during the Super Bowl featuring the first real footage from the movie.
This trailer will appear online at 1:00 A.M. (EST). You
can view the commercial now over at Latino Review. War of the Worlds opens in theaters June 29.

Fort Wayne Reader
Check out my reviews on movies I watched over the past
week here. I've been posting reviews of all the movies I watch on The Fort
Wayne Reader forums for several months now, so there's quite a backlog
of material. Since this is a forum you can comment on what you think of
these reviews/movies.

Hailing from the great people of England, comes a Romantic Comedy. With Zombies.

I caught this flick last year with my girlfriend, and to be honest, it was one of the funniest/best zombie flicks that has come out in a long time.

Shaun, a Electronics salesman, is leading a rather boring life, and decides to turn his moribund life around by winning back his ex-girlfriend, reconciling his relationship with his mother and dealing with an entire community that has returned from the dead to eat the living.

This movie just got released out to DVD not too long ago, so if you are in the mood for a good laugh, check it out. You wont be disappointed.

The Academy Awards
If directors like these can get looked over for the biggest award, is there
a compelling reason to watch The Academy Awards? From Yahoo:

British director Alfred Hitchcock is the best film-maker never to have been
handed an Oscar, according to a poll of British movie viewers released a day
before the 2005 nominations come out. Hitchcock was nominated as best director
at the Academy Awards six times between 1941 and 1961 for classic thrillers
like "Psycho" and "Rear Window", but failed to win a single
one.

In a poll of deserving non-Oscar winning directors by British viewers of cable
film channel Turner Classic Movies, Hitchcock edged out Martin Scorsese and
the late Stanley Kubrick.

Battlestar Galactica
Ron Moore's answering fan questions up on the Battlestar
Galactica blog. The best line from one of his answers is, "This
show is about our characters, not about the magical technology that they use."
I have to agree with him there. I've actually heard several people complaining
about the corded phones. Apparently, they can believe that gravity exists in
space but not that a phone has a cord:
Q. "What battlestar was Apollo from? Notice he's never mentioned it or
the loss of friends from whatever squad he was assigned to."
A. In my first draft of the mini, Lee Adama had just been accepted into test
pilot school on Caprica and was not currently assigned to any battlestar. Presumably,
he had been posted to at least a couple of battlestar air groups in his career,
as well as several ground assignments as well. (…) Overall, I'd say Lee
was striving (perhaps too hard) to blaze a different path for himself in the
fleet from that of his father. I don't think Lee ever saw himself as a battlestar
commander and was looking for a different way to make his mark.

Q. "Will we ever hear anything about other battlestars? Especially Pegasus?"
A. We have discussed the Pegasus storyline for a couple of years now. It's still
tooling around inside my brain, but I haven't settled on a take yet. Call it
a strong possibility at this point.

Q. "Why is everything so low tech when clearly these humans are so advanced?
It seems incongruous."
A. The plot explanation is that following the Cylon Uprising 40 years ago, Colonial
society took a giant step backwards to protect itself from the technological
nightmare it had unleashed. With their enemies able to hack into virtually any
network, the Colonials had to rely on stand-alone technologies that we not connected
to other components.

(…) You don't want to be using cordless phones when the ship is hit by
a nuke and power is disrupted to say the least. You want something reliable
and solid and preferably with a cord.

The creative explanation is that high-tech ships with touch screens and computers
that talk has been done to death in my opinion. Also, having magical technology
that does all the work for you tends to take the human beings out of the dramatic
equation. I wanted a lower-tech Galactica so that we could put people back into
scifi. This show is about our characters, not about the magical technology that
they use.

Corpse Bride
Check out the trailer for Tim Burton's upcoming animated movie Corpse
Bride. The movie looks a heck of a lot like The Nightmare Before
Christmas and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

ScrubsScrubs series creator Bill Lawrence is planning on shooting an episode
of the series like a traditional three-camera sitcom:

(…)an extended fantasy by J.D. (Zach Braff), who's treating a patient
who's a TV writer, will play out on the show as a traditional sitcom, complete
with a live audience and laugh track.

"Basically, it's tweaking sitcoms and an homage at the same time," says
"Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence, who's previously worked on traditional
sitcoms like "Spin City" (which he co-created) and "Friends."
"Zach and and Donald [Faison], on the show, love sitcoms; they're always
goofing on 'Sanford and Son' or 'Friends' and all the shows they watch."

EmptyWorld
My new favorite site: A site dedicated to fiction and film depicting the end
of the world, apocalypse and nuclear war. Plague, famine, drought and war all
feature..... Populations decimated, survivors struggling to re-build after the
apocalyptic event.......

Assault on Precinct 13
Assault on Precinct 13 the remake is a good film, but nowhere near being
great. It's not a hard movie to sit through but I would recommend it on DVD rather
that seeing it in theaters.

The plot follows the original in most respects; a group of police officers and
prisoners are trapped inside an abandoned police station by attackers outside
who are out to kill them at all costs. Whereas in the original you could imagine
why the gang-members were out to attack the police station, their blood oath to
their slain leader, in the remake this doesn't make sense since the gang members
have been replaced by corrupt cops. (And how do you go about explaining a bunch
of dead police officers?)

There are a few interesting set pieces when the police officers are attacking
the building but, in the end, it all turns to the usual Hollywood formulaic movie.
It even has the main "good guy" (Ethan Hawk) facing off against the
main "bad guy" (Gabriel Byrne) mano-e-mano at the end. If you've seen
the original then you'll know just about every twist and turn along the way. You'll
also know who lives and who dies by observing their star status.

One thing that bothers me about the remake was the lack of a strong female lead
as in the original. Here, the strong female is relegated to one of the criminal
side characters who gets little screen time but does have one cool scene with
a Tommy Gun.

Former "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" star Alyson Hannigan leaves
demon-infested Sunnydale behind for the mystery-filled seaside town of Neptune,
when she makes a guest appearance on the UPN Tuesday-night cult hit "Veronica
Mars." She's currently scheduled for one episode, with a possibility of
the role becoming recurring.

Stan Lee
Stan Lee's about to make the big bucks according to Yahoo:
NEW YORK - Stan Lee, the legendary cartoon hero creator who gifted Spider-Man
with the powerful "spidey-sense," is feeling a tingling of his own
— in his wallet. A Manhattan federal judge ruled that Lee is entitled
to a potential multimillion payday from Marvel Enterprises of profits generated
by the company's television and movie productions — particularly the box-office
smash "Spider-Man," which earned more than $800 million worldwide,
and its hugely successful sequel.

"It could be tens of millions of dollars," Howard Graff, attorney
for Lee, said Wednesday. "That's no exaggeration."

The two-hour Jan. 14 premiere of SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar
Galactica was the number-one cable program on that date in key demographics and
ranked as the highest-rated January show in the network's history. Galactica ranked
first among adults aged 25-54 and 18-49 and men aged 25-54, 18-49 and 18-34. The
show earned a 2.6 household rating (3.1 million viewers), ranking second among
all cable programs.

If you're not watching Battlestar Galactica, you don't know what
you're missing. Don't forget to watch Battlestar Galactica every Friday
night at 10:00 P.M. EST on the Sci Fi Channel.

Fantastic FourCheck out the trailer
for the upcoming movie Fantastic Four here. The trailer makes the
movie look interesting enough, but I'll hold judgment on the movie for a while.
I'll have to admit that the trailer doesn't get me all that excited about seeing
the Fantastic Four movie. Still, the original trailer for the first Spider-Man movie was AWFUL, and that movie turned out good enough.

Veronica Mars
This Tuesday (1/18), UPN will be reairing the first/pilot episode of Veronica
Mars. If you have yet to start watching Veronica Mars because
you've wanted to start watching it from the beginning, here's your chance.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Check out the teaser poster for the upcoming movie The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. Keep an eye out for the whale, the number "42",
the petunia and the towel (don't leave home without it.)

Battlestar Galactica
Read Battlestar Galactica the series creator Ronald Moore's thoughts
on the first episode in the official Battlestar
Galactica Blog. It's
actually pretty funny hinting at one of the major problems with sci fi these days;
the dreaded "technobabble."

Why 33 minutes?
The truth is, there's no real answer. It's just a random number that felt right
when I came up with the idea that our people were under continuous, relentless
attack since the end of the pilot. I wanted it to be a short interval, just long
enough for them to grab a bite to eat, jump in the shower and maybe try to catch
a catnap before dragging themselves back to their duty stations and begin the
whole tedious, terrifying ordeal all over again.

A deeper truth is, I was never interested in coming up with an explanation for
Why? Never. I mean, I suppose I could've come up with a sufficiently important-sounding
bit of technobabble that would've made sense (you see, the Cylon double-talk sensors
tracking the Olympic Carrier's nonsense drive signature needed 15 minutes to relay
the made-up data wave through the pretend continuum, then the Cylon navigational
hyper silly system needed another 10 minutes to recalculate the flux capacitor,
etc.) but what would that have really added to the drama? How does explaining
that 33 minute interval help our understanding of Laura's terrible moment of decision,
or bring us to any greater knowledge of Dualla's search for her missing family
and friends, or yield insight into Baltar's morally shattered psyche?
Read the rest of Ronald's thoughts here.

Don't forget to watch Battlestar Galactica the series every Friday night at 10:00 9:00 P.M. EST.

Battlestar Galactica
The first season of Battlestar Galactica hasn't even aired in the U.S.
and the remake's creator Ronald Moore is already talking about a possible second
season:

The showrunner isn’t saying much about what direction season two would
go for Commander Adama and his crew if it actually comes to fruition — we
haven’t even seen season one yet, after all — but he does admit that
it will be different from what genre fans have come to expect from sci-fi TV.

“It was fun breaking the first six [episodes], which is essentially the
first half of the second season kind of like laid out,” Moore says, while
also hinting that season one ends on a cliffhanger. “I sort of knew the
direction I wanted to go, though by no means had we really plotted out exactly
what the resolution of the cliffhanger [would be ahead of time].”

The Sandbaggers
Forget the recent return of the spy drama 24 to television. The absolute
best-ever television spy drama has to be the The Sandbaggers, which aired
on U.K. television in the late 1970's/early 1980's and is available for the rest
of us on DVD. Trust me when I say that these old episodes of The Sandbaggers hold their own against any modern television series – HBO series included.

Battlestar Galactica
There have been several updates to the official site for the upcoming Battlestar
Galactica series over at Sci Fi.com. First off, there are descriptions and
a trailer for the first two episodes of the series, being aired as a two hour
block next Friday (1/14), and a new section devoted to the various ships used
in the series. For example, did you know that the Cylon Base Ship "dwarfs
the Battlestar Galactica (and) overmatch(es) the Galactiva in nearly every tactical
respect?" I didn't!

The official synopsis behind the first two episodes goes, "As the ragtag
fleet plays cat-and-mouse with the Cylons, Roslin and Adama face the possibility
that one of their ships has been infiltrated by the enemy."

Ah yes, the days of Christmas have come and gone, and My wonderful girlfriend was kind enough to bless me with a classic kick ass PC game from the past, aptly titled PIRATES!

Now back in the era of my Commodore 64, this game was first released, and I was instantly addicted to playing it. Nowhere else in the Commodore 64 Universe could I lose about 14 hours by just playing one single game, except pirates. Well, our good friends at Atari, under the expressed tutalidge of Sid Meier himself, have updated and released a newer version of pirates for the new Millenia. All I can say is "YAARARRRRR! GIMMIE THE GOLD YA SCURVY CURR!"

Our little quest begins with the main character (thats you Pirate laddie or Lass) having his family kidnapped by an evil Baron, and you embark to find them, and do a little plundering of the Spanish Main while ye are at it.

Now mind ye, the Spanish Main is chock full of nationalities vying for colonization of the new world, so while ye be out on yer quest, ye will run into such wonderful people as the English, the French, the Dutch, and of course, the Spanish.

Right off from the start, ye command a small ship with about 10 cannons and 40 sailors on board. From then on, the game is wide open. Ye can capture and plunder the various merchant ships that pass by, visit nearby outposts/trading posts and speak with their governor, Sack and loot towns, find buried treasure, and attack the various pirates that cruise about the very waters that ye be sailin in.

Graphically, the Atari team did a wonderful job of updating all the graphics. The ship to ship battles are awesome, where you get the opportunity to fire different types of cannon shot (Chain and Grape are a few), masts snap, people get blown off, and ships break in half explosively when sunk. Ye also get the opportunity to board a ship and either fight to take it over... Or the enemy captain might just surrender ta ye, depending on how much of a scurrvy pirate ye be.

So, if ye be havin the time, pick up a copy of Pirates! at your local gaming store!

House
Fox has picked up a full season of their medical drama House. From Yahoo:

The network has ordered five additional episodes of the critically praised
drama starring Hugh Laurie ("Blackadder") as a disheveled physician
with an apparent distaste for his patients. The first-season tally now stands
at 18 episodes.

Despite airing Tuesdays after the reality flop "The Rebel Billionaire: Branson's
Quest for the Best," the new drama has held its ground. It built significantly
on its lead-in and posted series highs in total viewers (6.9 million) and adults
18-49 (2.9 rating/8 share), respectively, in its two most recent airings.

(Natalie) Portman will star as a young woman "recruited" by a violent
freedom fighter in an alternate future where the Germans won WWII… Filming
is expected to begin in March with a late 2005 release planned.

Amazon describes the comic book, and base material for the movie, V
for Vendetta as:

A frightening and powerful story of the loss of freedom and identity in a
totalitarian world, V for Vendetta takes place in an alternate future in which
Germany wins WWII and Britain becomes a fascist state. A vigilante named "V"
stalks the streets of London trying to free England of its ideological chains.
Moore's poetic language coupled with Lloyd's eerie, washed-out color art makes
this a captivating read sure to stay with you.

War of the WorldsInteresting
new photos from the upcoming Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise remake of War
of the Worlds. The movie certainly looks good, and the last time Spielberg
directed Cruise in a movie, Minority Report, the
results were decent enough. I have high hopes for this movie.

Veronica Mars
New Veronica Mars tonight (1/4) on UPN. (Rumor has it that UPN began airing repeats of the show after it deemed future Veronica Mars episodes too controversial for holiday season viewers.)

Veronica uncovers information that her fellow outcast Mac (guest star Tina
Majorino) was switched at birth with a more affluent student, causing Veronica
to examine her own questions about whom her real father may be.

Meanwhile, a serial killer has resurfaced in Neptune forcing Sheriff Lamb to forge
a reluctant, tense partnership with Keith. Later, Veronica flirts with a handsome
young rookie at the sheriff's department to obtain more information on Lilly's
murder.

RIP
Influential comic book and fantasy illustrator legends (Frank) Kelly Freas and
Will Eisner have passed away. (One of the top awards a person working in comic
books can win is named "The Eisner Awards" after Will Eisner.)

Eisner:His newspaper connection included creating "The Spirit" insert for
Sunday papers from 1940 to 1952.

Eisner received the 1995 Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award and the 1998
Reuben Award as cartoonist of the year from the National Cartoonists Society.

Freas:"Kelly Freas created the future in his paintings, sleekly delineating
a style that has influenced two generations of designers as the technology became
available to make his fantasies real," said Paul Levitz, the President of
DC Comics, which publishes Mad Magazine. "And with the impish grin he gave
Alfred, he winked and warned us not to take it all too seriously."

His other illustrations included the official patch of NASA's 1973 Skylab 1 orbiting
space station, as well as the covers of such Mad paperbacks as "Son of Mad"
and "Ides of MAD."

New Calendar
Do we really need a new calendar from some condescending [email protected] scientist? This
has to be a joke. Can't we get this guy working on some killer robots or something
other than a replacement for a (last time I checked) working calendar!? From New
Scientist:

Henry designed a calendar that uses 364 days, which breaks down evenly into
52 weeks. In his so called "Calendar-and-Time" (C&T) plan, each
month contains 30 or 31 days. He decided on each month's length by forbidding
the new calendar to differ from the old one by more than five days and by setting
Christmas Day, 25 December, to always fall on a Sunday.

His constraints meant eight months would have different lengths than they do now.
March, June, September, and December would each contain 31 days, while the other
months would each get 30. To keep the calendar in synchronisation with the seasons,
Henry inserted an extra week - which is not part of any month - every five or
six years. He named the addition "Newton Week" in honour of his favourite
physicist, Isaac Newton.

"If I had my way, everyone would get Newton Week off as a paid vacation and
could spend the time doing physics, or other activities of their choice,"
he says. (Yes folks, that's "Newton Week." First one to joke "Eye
of Newton Week" wins the booby prize. – Bert)

Despite this incentive, Henry says he has encountered resistance to his plan -
mainly because people would be "stuck" with a birthday that always falls
on a Wednesday, for example. Henry, who is among that group, is not moved by the
argument. "You have my permission to celebrate your birthday the
preceding or following Saturday," he says.

And he is not stopping with dates - Henry says the entire world should operate
on Greenwich Mean Time. People in the eastern US, for example, would have to get
used to eating their midday meals when the clocks read 1700. "People are
adaptable if benefits are there," says Henry. (And those benefits would
be…? – Bert)

From a person living in a country that's yet to adapt to what the rest of the
world uses as measurements, ie. the metric system, all I have to say about changing
the calendar is - good luck.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The first real look at the characters from next summer's upcoming The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Remember your towel. Don't panic
– larger
views of the images here. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will be released into theaters May 6 of this year.

Lost and Alias This Wednesday, new episodes of Lost begin airing again on
ABC while Alias returns for it's fourth season on the same network.
(Lost aires at 8:00 P.M. with Alias starting at 9:00 P.M.
– all times EST.) I watched Alias when it was first on in 2001, but
quickly gave up when it seemed to me as if the episodes were indistinguishable
from one and other. However, there are some people I know that really like the
show so I think I'm going to give Alias another try.

Read some older entries about Alias I made back in 2001 here, here and here.